


Testing the Waters

by wordybee



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Episode Related, F/M, Jeff Winger is in love with Annie Edison and knows it, Pining, Seriously though so much pining, Weaving some Jeff/Annie into Season 6, mostly canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-03-22 11:23:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 33,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3726985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordybee/pseuds/wordybee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeff and Annie aren't dating, but Jeff can't stop thinking about how they maybe could be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Acceptance is the First Step

**Author's Note:**

> This story will be made up of chapters that take place before, during, or after season 6 episodes. Might throw some bonus ones in there if the mood strikes me.

There’s something like reset button in Jeff’s mind that he hits whenever things get too hard to deal with. It’s really just acute compartmentalization, an innate ability to ignore the things that bother him if he really, really tries – but it’s interesting to think of it as a reset button.

It usually works.

The ease with which he can slide into comforts of the past – past feelings, past habits, past thoughts – seems to toe the line of “unnatural.” Britta would probably say it bordered on sociopathy and Annie would call it a form of unhealthy denial and Abed would say it was inconsistent character development, but Jeff calls it good old fashioned coping.

Jeff doesn’t think he would have made it as far as he has if he couldn’t occasionally hit reset on certain parts of his life. Sometimes they’ve been big parts – like meeting his father; _that_ had been a serious reset on all kinds of emotions, mostly the one where he _doesn’t want to think about his father_ – and sometimes they were small – like his repeated reset on some of the Dean’s more unusual (read: creepy) habits at any given moment. The madness of Greendale made Jeff especially grateful for his coping mechanism. He periodically wonders how the rest of the people who attend the school as faculty or students manage to handle it.

When Jeff arrives on campus just before the start of the new semester he can’t help thinking about what being a _teacher_ really means for him. He remembers grading papers and making lesson plans and lecturing twice a day for over an hour each class session. Those memories, separated by the two months of _nothing_ he’d been doing over summer break, fill him with a bones-deep feeling of exhaustion.

A sense of longing nostalgia floods through him as he remembers taking blow-off class after blow-off class when he was a student here. They were easy to come by at Greendale – with a selection of electives like _Ladders_ it was possible to pad out any given semester with stress-free A grades.

Greendale Community College is an institution of lowered standards. Why should _Jeff_ be the only professor who takes his job seriously? 

He has forgotten about the thrill of accomplishment he felt when he tried actually teaching, that first class period after Annie lectured him on caring about his job. Reveling in the rapt attention of his students is only a vague, far-away impression that can’t compete with his eager desire to _not try_. It’s the grading and the writing that Jeff recalls vividly, and he doesn’t want to go back to that. 

He decides his lesson plan for the semester will be a brief, cynical speech about the fantastic evils of being a lawyer and the pointlessness of the country’s justice system. There will also be a video of some sort – he hasn’t decided on what it will be yet, but he’s sure the library has suitably boring DVDs that would distract his students nicely.

Jeff figures everyone will be happy because he doesn’t have to do anything and it’s going to be an easy A for all his students. There will be no Annie Edisons in his classes this semester, no one there to call him out on his turn from enthusiastic professor to teacher of the most breeziest of blow-off classes.

It’s a perfect reset.

\---------

He hits his reset button when he encounters Britta for the first time on school grounds. 

He probably would have walked right past her if his phone hadn’t made a chiming noise that he had to stop and check. It turns out that the chime is for another reminder of his pre-semester meeting with the Dean. Jeff dismisses the alert with a brief thought of, _How the hell did Annie get to my phone?_ (Because _he_ certainly hadn’t set that reminder, and he hadn’t set the one that had gone off forty-five minutes ago, either.)

As he’s shaking his head in a mix of wonder and annoyance, Jeff glances to his right and sees Britta. And a tent.

Already half an hour late for his meeting, Jeff figures he can spare another five minutes to really take in whatever the hell Britta is doing now. He’s sure it’s another one of her ridiculous causes or protests or _whatever_.

It’s true they’ve seen each other since the engagement debacle the previous semester, but there is something strange about seeing her within the context of Greendale. Thinking about the fact that they’re only a short distance away from the place where they’d almost made the biggest mistake of their lives makes something in Jeff squirm uncomfortably.

So he doesn’t think about it. He has a brief moment of discomfort, and then resets it to before the weirdness ever happened. Instead, he fully registers the fact that her shirt is on backwards and her hair looks like it hasn’t been brushed in days and she’s clearly _living in a tent_. 

“You look like shit,” he tells her.

She glares at him, but apparently Britta’s just as capable of hitting reset as he is because she doesn’t look awkward or embarrassed at all. In fact, she never did – she never does, about anything, or if she does get embarrassed she’s usually over it so quickly it doesn’t even matter. Jeff would never admit it, but he respects her ability to hide whatever damaged pride exists inside her with near-flawless ease.

“I’m homeless, Jeff. Give me a break.”

He shrugs.

“I was homeless for a while and I looked great the entire time,” Jeff says. He makes sure to load the statement with a lofty air of chastisement, just because he knows it’ll piss Britta off. Also: it’s true. Jeff _had_ looked great, even when he’d been living out of his car. 

“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“An asshole with an apartment.”

If it’s possible, Britta’s glare intensifies. She haughtily climbs back into her tent and zips it closed, and Jeff smirks.

It’s remarkably easy to reset his friendship with Britta back to what it was before their terror-fueled engagement.

\------

The reset button does not work on Annie. 

He has a theory that it doesn’t work because there’s no real difference between the way he felt about her before his feelings jump-started a robot and after. The only difference between the two is confirmation, a neatly printed label over the mixture of lust and affection and respect and friendship and attraction that’s been mingling around in him since… since god knows when – maybe since the beginning, maybe since three years ago, maybe since a surprise kiss on stage won Greendale a debate championship.

The imaginary label says ‘love’ in indelible ink and there is no reset button that can rip it away.

Instead, Jeff looks at Annie and feels all the things he’s felt for an indeterminate amount of time, and he knows them for what they are and accepts them for what they are because there’s nothing else he can do but accept them. He has moved beyond trying to deny what’s really going on, though not exactly toward actually doing anything about it…

When she smiles at him he smiles back, and when there’s a lull in their conversations together he thinks about asking her out to dinner.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know what her answer would be, and that terrifies him. There was once a time when she would have accepted an invitation out to dinner with him immediately, but so much has changed and Jeff can no longer predict what she would say. The timing is terrible, Jeff knows – but maybe, if he’s patient, things might work out. 

The truth is that he’s not ready, and she’s not ready, and even after the terrifying close call that ended with Annie in a neck brace and Jeff on the verge of a fear-induced heart attack he doesn’t say a thing.

He can’t use that mental reset button on Annie because as well as knowing the word _love_ and knowing the timing just isn’t right, Jeff also knows that resetting this won’t change a thing. Can’t change a thing.

The reset button usually works, except for when it doesn’t. 

Except for when Jeff Winger doesn’t want to use it.

 


	2. The Simple Truth Is...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post 6x02. Jeff and Annie talk in a bar.

Jeff wants no part in the inevitable train wreck that is Britta living with Annie and Abed, and he hopes he makes this clear through simply not paying attention to anything they ever say about Britta, including: her sleeping arrangements, the delineation of chores, or how Annie and Abed plan to deal with ‘the marijuana smell.’ It turns out that Annie needs a more direct approach, though, because when they go out to a bar in order to welcome Elroy into their little ragtag group of well-meaning incompetents, she turns to him and starts _talking_ about it.

“Things are going really great with Britta, you know,” she says, right before she starts sucking her fruity cocktail drink through a straw with a trace of wide-eyed panic on her face.

Jeff gives her a disbelieving look. He doesn’t want to have this conversation, but he’s learned over the years that not talking to Annie is one of the hardest things for him to do. By all means, it’s not an _impossible_ task – but it’s one that requires a lot of willpower, and all his energy has been thoroughly sapped by dealing with the Dean and his crazy antics.

“I heard she freaked out and stole a kid’s tricycle.”

Annie shrugs a shrug that includes hand waving and some interesting facial expressions that make Jeff smile, just a little. He reins in the smile to something more cool and apathetic and takes a sip of his scotch.

“It was a little rough for a while there, but it’s going to be so much better now… I think she even offered to cook dinner sometime this week, but she wasn’t very coherent.” She sighs. “The existential crisis really did a number on her.”

“Life did a number on Britta a long time ago, Annie,” he tells her. “It’s just now catching up.”

“Well, I’m just glad she’s around. It’ll be good for Abed and me to have someone else from the group in the apartment.” She lets out a short laugh. “If the place were bigger, we wouldn’t mind shoving all of you guys in there.”

“Annie, is there a Study Group cult commune blueprint forming in your head right now?”

Jeff glances over and, as he expected, she’s grinning and rolling her eyes at him. “No, _Jeff_. Just… You know, the group. Together. If there’s no Space Buddha, it’s _not_ a cult.”

“That’s the definition of ‘cult’ now, huh? Space Buddha organization?” Jeff nods thoughtfully. “Good to know.”

There’s a lull in the conversation while they wait for the others to get back from ordering a second round from the bar. At least, Britta and Frankie are ordering second rounds – Abed had found a very old, dusty, probably broken arcade machine in a far corner and Jeff assumes he’s trying to get Elroy to fix it. Or Elroy’s stealing parts off of it for another stupid virtual reality game, or cursing its existence as a distraction from 3D immersion technology, or trying to turn it into a time machine – Jeff hasn’t really figured the guy out yet.

“Do you ever think—“

“No.”

“Jeff.” Annie smacks his arm. He looks at her and doesn’t hide his smirk.

“Do you ever think,” she starts again, “that Greendale is the only thing keeping us all together?”

When he turns back to her, she’s looking pensive and is stirring her bright red drink with her straw. The sadness on her face makes him feel something unpleasant – something that almost feels like _guilt_ , even though he has nothing to feel guilty about. But to Jeff, a sad Annie is an Annie that needs to be made happy again – _pronto –_ and as long as she’s not happy, he’s not doing his job.

He hides his concern behind a put-upon sigh. “Please don’t tell me you’re a sad drunk.”

“I’m not even drunk.” Her lips curve in a flicker of a smile, but it’s not enough.

“Tell that to the shot of vodka swimming around in your silly pink cocktail.”

“It’s _red_ ,” she yelps, aghast, and Jeff feels a moment of triumph because he’s managed to distract her from that bout of sadness – or lethargy, or worry or whatever it had been that hadn’t been Annie, _happy_.

Just as he doesn’t know when he started loving her, Jeff doesn’t know when her happiness became such a concern for him. Jeff is pretty sure it happened before the love, but only because it makes sense that way and he can remember hating to see her cry long before he entertained ideas of taking her out to dinner or kissing her in Greendale storage closets.

He hears her sigh and even though she looks a little brighter than before, there’s still a lingering sadness in her.

“I just think… You know, if we didn’t have Greendale, would we still be friends?”

“Come on, Annie,” he says, “I thought we went through this _years_ ago… Look, don’t you still talk to Troy _all the time_ even though he’s been all over the world for the last year?”

“Yes, but—“

“And Shirley sends us those stupidly long monthly newsletters from Atlanta even though I’m pretty sure there can’t be nearly enough stuff going on in Atlanta to warrant their length, or frequency, or the weird crime drama plots.”

“They’re well written, though. I told her she should make them into a book, but Abed’s eager for the rights to the film.”

“And now you have Britta living under your roof along with Abed, so you can keep an eye on both of them.” He waves a dismissive hand. “We’ll be fine.”

That earns a more sincere smile from Annie. She drinks some more of her drink and chews on her straw thoughtfully, tracing a well-worn gouge in the tabletop with one finger in idle silence. Then she cuts her eyes to Jeff and the smile turns coy.

“What about you?” she asks.

 _Jeff_ isn’t being coy when he replies, confused, “What about me, what?”

“What about you and the group.” Something like nervousness flickers across her face. She tries to get more drink through her straw and is met with the loud slurping sound of an empty glass, and thus the end of using her drink as method of distraction.

Jeff looks her squarely in the eyes and tells her, “Annie. If I haven’t left by now, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’m never leaving. I’m very glad to say that you’re stuck with me.” He lifts his eyebrows and grins his smuggest grin. “Glad for you, that is. I’m great to be stuck with.”

She laughs and it’s not a girlish giggle but a full laugh that sends an effervescence of joy from Jeff’s heart to the tips of his fingers and toes. He knows he should feel embarrassed by that reaction but he can’t help just _accepting_ it. It makes his smile go more softly sincere, though he’s sure Annie misses the transition, and he can’t dismiss his feelings simply because it makes him seem less cool to _himself_.

Jesus, how’d he survive so long being so self-conscious? It’s so much easier to just accept that he’s a lovesick forty-year-old whose happiest moments are when he can make Annie Edison happy. Jeff had nearly suffocated himself with his own ego in the past – why had he thought that was _good_?

 _This_ is good. Seeing Annie laugh is good.

“Apparently you’re a sappy drunk,” Annie says. She pushes her empty glass toward the middle of the table and rests her head on an outstretched arm, her eyes still locked with his and sparkling.

“Not even close to being drunk,” Jeff counters.

“So you’re just sappy?”

Jeff smirks and sips his scotch. He’s saved from really answering when Britta and Frankie come back with a tray of drinks, including another fruity concoction – this one so vividly green it’s almost glowing in the dark – for Annie. Abed and Elroy evidently sense more alcohol and return moments later.

The vodka could be blamed for Annie’s sudden bout of bubbliness, but Jeff suspects it has more to do with the way she keeps glancing over to him with a knowing look in her eyes.

 _I know the secret of sappy Jeff Winger,_ she seems to be thinking, doubtlessly with an air of friendly mockery. He’s sure that she thinks he’s going to find a way to disabuse her verdict on his sappiness and is just waiting for an opportunity to do so.

He’s not. He _wants_ her to know that, yes, he cares about his friends. He wants her to know that he cares about _her_ , even when he can’t come right out and say it with the exact words.

 

The night wears on until, one by one, they decide it’s time to leave the bar and head to their respective homes. Elroy’s trip is the shortest, since he’s parked his RV in the bar’s gravel lot. He’s lucky. The Colorado night is cold and everyone who isn’t Elroy has to wait outside for their taxis.

“Hey, Jeff?”

He looks over and there’s Annie, her arms curled around herself in a futile attempt to keep warm while only wearing a silk blouse, dress trousers, and a jacket that looks more stylish than functional. He smiles at her. For a brief moment, he wonders if she’d forgotten their conversation in the bar – hours and two brightly colored Annie drinks ago, now – but then she reaches around his torso and pulls him into a hug.

“Thank you,” she whispers, the sound of it muffled by his coat.

Jeff wraps his arms around her, returning the hug. “You’re welcome,” he says.

After a few seconds, Annie still hasn’t moved and Jeff is about to question that when she says – louder, this time, though still muffled, “You’re really warm.”

He breathes out a small laugh. “Stay as long as you like.”

 


	3. Contagion: Cynicism and the Death of Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during and after 6x03. Jeff's feelings on the possibility of losing Annie Edison.

It’s just a dog. That’s what Jeff keeps thinking as Annie pleads with them to find another way around Greendale’s impending crisis. _It’s just a dog_ , and Jeff likes dogs just fine – but he doesn’t like them so much that he’s willing to _lose_ because of one.

And that’s how Jeff thinks of the race against City College: win or lose. They either find a way to make City College lose, or _Greendale_ loses. Since Jeff is on the side of Greendale, that loss extends to him – to Jeff, who had won court case after court case, who had little experience with losing until he came to Greendale and found out first-hand that sometimes shiny words and confidence couldn’t save the day, sometimes things were beyond his ability to bluff and charm and manipulate. Greendale hadn’t taught him much, but it had taught him that losing was possible for Jeff Winger and he really didn't like it. 

Now he’s losing Annie. Again, that’s what he’s thinking – not _Greendale_ is losing Annie, or the committee is losing Annie, but _he’s_ losing her. She’s walking away from him, because Jeff’s obsession with winning on his own terms – as underhanded and malicious as any method he’d used in court – struck her as terms she hadn’t wanted to associate with. 

He knows she’s upset with the quality of Greendale, the college’s standards and the worth of its students, but he knows she’s more upset with the _morality_ of the group. She’s upset because she thought everyone would rally together and unite, righteous against unrighteous, to win the day. She had the mistaken notion that everyone cared as much as she did about fairness and unsportsmanlike conduct when, actually, there are far more Jeff Wingers in the world than there are Annie Edisons. There are more people who place winning over fairness, and the reputation of dogs, and the truth – the unsullied, untwisted, unpleasant truth.

When Annie is really gone, Jeff’s mind stutters through a realization that it could be his fault, that maybe he tainted this committee in some way with his scheming lawyer tactics, that his stubborn refusal to lose and his natural ability to sway people over to his side of an argument resulted in a committee willing to scrounge through the mud in order to find a win.

He thinks it could be possible that there are so many Jeff Wingers in the world because people like _him_ keep taking people like _Annie_ and making them hate the world around them.

Jeff wonders if it’s self-centered to think that this all comes down to him - that Annie would value his opinion, his thoughts, his ethics so much that she would rather leave than face the idea that Jeff might not be as good and decent as she’d hoped he could be.

When Elroy asks whether Annie had been close, Jeff ignores him. It’s not worth clarifying. How exactly does one summarize the insane history of their friendship? _We were a study group and then we were family_ sounds too much like a tagline to a movie even Abed wouldn’t see, and _we’re friends_ is just too simplified. _I’m in love with her_ is way too honest, and it’s still not the right time. 

That’s when Jeff realizes that maybe Elroy had been talking about Annie and the _group_ and not just Annie and Jeff, and he feels slightly embarrassed for a split second before mentally shrugging that embarrassment away.

“I’ll talk to her when I get home,” says Abed, his tone neutral as he turns back to the video he’d been working on.

The others also seem to think that Annie leaving is a problem that can easily be fixed by talking to her, and maybe it is. She’s only leaving Greendale, after all – and hadn’t Jeff told her that Greendale didn’t matter? Hadn’t he explained that they would be friends regardless of where she attended school? Everyone going to Greendale had certainly made it a lot easier to keep in touch with each other – but a world separated them from Troy and they still communicated, and two time zones separated them from Shirley but she still sent them letters and express-mailed packages of homemade mini pies. Greendale was a hub where they could all gather, but their friendship went beyond that.

Didn’t it? 

Why is Jeff so worried, then? Why does he have the terrible fear that Annie walking out that door means she isn’t coming back?

_Because she didn’t leave_ Greendale _,_ his brain supplies. She isn’t leaving Greendale; she’s leaving him. She’s leaving him, and his cynicism, and his lack of respect for her feelings. She’s leaving him alone in this place because she’s finally realized that Jeff Winger doesn’t learn and doesn’t change and doesn’t care, and Jeff Winger only begets more Jeff Wingers.

It’s ironic, because he does care. He cares. He cares about her, he cares about their friends, and he even cares about this stupid, godforsaken school and all its insanity. Jeff wonders what would happen if he were to follow after her and _tell_ her, even though he still knows that they’re not ready. Would she believe him, or would she believe he was just saying something that needed to be said in order to get her to return?

Jeff knows the answer. He doesn’t go after her.

Instead, he turns to Abed and says, “Change of plans.”

 ---------------

Annie hugs him as they’re all packing up to leave. He can’t help smiling, because a little while ago he’d been afraid she might never hug him again, or talk to him again, or look at him again without that broken disappointment in her eyes. The idea of him  _not_ being friends with Annie was terrifying in a way that was, in itself, terrifying. Jeff wasn’t used to wanting people, and he definitely wasn’t used to needing them.

Then she leans in and, eyes glittering with happiness or tears or happy tears, she tells him, “Thanks for letting Abed make the new commercial.”

His first instinct is to calmly tell her, _No, that was me. It was my idea,_ and his second instinct is to _yell_ it at her. Jeff wants _credit_ for that idea - because it was a good one morally as well as a good one strategically, because it was proof that he wasn’t a lost cause, that he was just as capable of being like her as everyone else in the world was of being like _him_.

Most of all, though, he wants credit because it was the idea that brought her back to him. To them. It was the idea that kept Annie from leaving them forever, and he wants her to know that it was because _he hadn’t wanted her to leave_.

Instead, though, Jeff smiles. He says, “Whatever,” with an aloof shrug and hands her her jacket and her laptop bag.

Jeff doesn’t know why he doesn’t take the credit immediately. He doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t think she’d believe him, or what. Annie has a habit of believing the best in people (even Jeff Winger, though tonight showed him that even Annie has her limits) so she probably would have, eventually, thought him capable of initiating the change in the commercial. She also probably would have looked at him with utter _disbelief_ first – maybe for just a second, maybe for longer, but she would do it. That, Jeff thinks, is what the problem is.

He wants to stop surprising Annie with moments of goodness. He wants her to expect them from him naturally and he wants to fulfill those expectations.

Ever since the realization that he loved Annie Jeff had been biding his time because he’d wanted to make sure she’d love him back, but now he realizes that her loving him back isn’t really the problem. He wants her to _like_ him, and he wants to be worthy of her liking and loving him, and he wants to feel like more than cynicism and pretentiousness wrapped up in designer clothes and good hair. Jeff wants to be better, and he wants her to see him as _good_. 

Annie grins, wide and bright, at him as they leave the study room. Abed is several steps ahead, chattering animatedly to one of his A/V friends on his phone, and Annie looks aglow with newfound hope in the people around her. 

Hope that Jeff had inspired, and even though he hadn’t taken credit for it he is still proud.

“What are you smiling about?” Annie asks, startling Jeff out of his thoughts.

“Oh, uh…” He tries to think of a decent excuse because god knows he can’t say _I’m just happy you’re happy_. Jeff likes to believe he’s been evolving as a person over the last couple months, but there’s a huge difference between _evolution_ and _saying stuff that will immediately get him mistaken for a pod person_.

Annie saves him by playfully nudging up against his side. “Don’t worry, no one back in Coolsville will know you went along with something nice to save Greendale.”

Jeff scoffs at that and the words, “Please, I didn’t do anything to save _Greendale,_ " are out of his mouth before he can stop them.

Something that looks like suspicion glimmers in Annie’s expression, accented by a charmed-but-confused upturn of lips. Jeff quickly offsets whatever train of thought she might be trying to launch by frowning at her.

“Also: _Coolsville_? I wasn’t aware that 1950s beach movies were in Abed’s DVD collection.”

Annie laughs. “Okay, not Coolsville… Aloof City? Aloofsilvania? Coolsburgh?”

She’s giggling as she lists ridiculous place names and Jeff can see that her eyelids are dropping closed and her feet are shuffling more than walking on the journey out into the parking lot. She's clearly exhausted - hell, _he's_ exhausted and he's pretty sure he got more sleep than she did - and as a result, Annie is drifting closer and closer to him as they walk.

“Did you sleep at _all_ when you got home?”

“Nope. I’m a little punch-drunk.”

That's so obvious that Jeff has to laugh: “Yeah, I can tell.”

When she leans against his side and closes her eyes with a yawn, Jeff wonders if she’ll assume that he puts his arms around her shoulders in order to steer her away from walking into any walls or pillars, or if she knows deep down that he does it because he wants to keep her close and wants her to _know_ that.

And also the steering thing, because he’s pretty sure she’s sleepwalking now.

 


	4. The Universe is Cold (Emotionally and Thermally)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another bar, another talk, another not-a-date. Takes place during and after 6x04.

As he leans in close to her just before the theater lights go down, Jeff wonders if this is what it’d be like to go out on a date with Annie Edison. The thought doesn’t last long – not because it’s not enticing but because it’s not quite right. If he were on a date with Annie, he hopes she wouldn’t be so obviously upset the entire time and that he would probably aim a little higher than a Greendale, Colorado stage production of _The Karate Kid_.

Jeff never really thought much about dating before. He thought about sex, and sometimes dinner and a movie were precursors to sex – but mostly, they weren’t. Mostly, sex was just sex.

When he was very young – _fourteen_ is the age that’s sticking in his head – he’d thought about taking a girl he’d liked on a date to the fair. Flowers and a tuxedo too short in the legs and arms are coming to mind. That teenage version of Jeff feels false, like a half-remembered movie that somehow got mixed in with his real life recollections, but if it is true – if gangly, teenage Jeff once entertained the idea of taking a pretty girl on a date to the fair – it must have been the first and last time he’d thought about really _dating_.

Jeff doesn’t remember the date, or the girl, or the asking, so he assumes it must have gone poorly. He’s seen pictures of himself at fourteen, and kind of remembers how awkward he’d been, so he’s not surprised.

The pictures had been burned at the bottom of a little metal trashcan the last time he’d visited his mom’s place, a long time ago. Erased from reality, just like that failure of a first time asking a girl out on a date had been (mostly) erased from Jeff’s memory. Jeff regrets burning the pictures and wonders if his mother might still have the negatives.

He weirdly wants Annie to see him as a fourteen-year-old. Wants her to see that there’s a ‘Little Annie Adderall’ buried in everyone, even in Jeff Winger. He thinks she would laugh at the pictures but it wouldn’t be a mocking laugh, it’d be a… laugh of affinity, a realization that there could be more to Jeff than expensive face cream and designer jeans. His lack of depth had always been a kind of armor for him but, well – armor could be discarded when not in battle, after all.

The theater darkens and the show begins, and Jeff makes a mental note to email his mother about those pictures.

\--------

“Are you telling me no one in this bar hates themselves?”

Annie stirs her drink – a subdued, if still colorful, vodka and cranberry – and leans against the bar casually as she looks around the darkened room. The others had left after the first round, but Jeff and Annie had moved their stools closer to each other and ordered their second drinks. He’s still here because she’s still here and he wonders if she’s still here because he’d asked her out.

Well, not _asked her out_ , exactly. He promises himself that if he does work up the courage to ask Annie Edison out on a date, he’ll be more direct about it.

_And no one else is invited_ , he thinks, remembering the friends that had trailed behind them on the way to the bar.

But he had pulled her aside for this, had given her his arm and an inviting _Milady?_ and they had walked off together. That probably counts for something, and maybe Annie doesn’t want to break apart the pair he’d made out of them.

“I’m sure some of them do,” Jeff answers with a shrug, “but the people who count don’t. You, me…” He points to a random patron sitting in the far corner, playing a game on his phone. “And that guy.”

Annie’s grin slides into a feigned thoughtful frown. “I don’t know, that guy looks pretty alone. I think he might hate himself a _little_.”

“Please. Alone in a bar at eleven o’clock on a Friday? That guy’s fine.” He takes a sip of his scotch and isn’t sure if the warmth that extends to his fingertips comes from the alcohol or the bright, happy smile Annie gives him. He waits a beat before saying, “Now that I’m one and a half glasses into this evening, I’m just drunk enough to ask… why was _Annie Edison_ jealous of Ben Chang tonight?”

“Really?” She looks away, rolling her glass between her hands – embarrassed? Maybe, probably… Being jealous of Chang would inspire embarrassment in anyone with a scrap of dignity, and Annie has way more than a scrap. Jeff feels a little bad for bringing it up, especially because it wipes the smile off Annie’s face and makes it so that she can’t quite meet his eyes, but showing concern and caring about his friends – that’s growing, right? That’s progress. That’s what he’s been trying to get himself to do ever since Borchert’s lab.

So what if he has to get through one and a half glasses of scotch to show unprompted friendly interest in someone he cares about? He’s still considering it progress.

“Really what?” He drinks some more scotch, because it can only get easier as he gets drunker. Probably. Actually – that’s very likely an unhealthy philosophy, and he thinks maybe he needs to investigate it more when he’s sober. “All I’m doing here is asking why you – future President of the United States and/or the World – would ever feel a second of jealousy over anything Benjamin Chang has ever done or lied about doing.”

That at least gets her to look back at him. She rolls her eyes, but they meet his when the rolling is done. “I am not going to be President of the United States, Jeff. I want to be a criminal investigator.”

“Okay, Annie Edison: future Superhero Criminal Investigator.”

“Would I be investigating superhero criminals, or—”

“You would be so good at being a criminal investigation person that you would _basically_ be a superhero. It’s just a shortcut term for ‘really good’ – there are no actual superheroes involved.”

Laughing, Annie says, “Thanks for clearing that up.” She drinks a mouthful of vodka and cranberry that must’ve been mostly water, considering how much the ice has melted from all her stirring. “And I don’t really know… I just… I get weird when I think I’m good at something and it turns out I’m not?”

That makes Jeff chuckle. Not just because it sounds _very_ familiar, but also: “Annie, you’re good at pretty much everything you do. You realize that, right? It’s almost unnatural how good you are at so many things.”

“I’m not good at _acting_.” She takes another swig and definitely gets some vodka, because she does a full-body shudder that tells Jeff she’s not quite ready to move past the sugary, neon-bright fruity drinks yet. Maybe she never will be. Maybe it’ll always be appletinis for Annie Edison, and when Jeff imagines a future in which he orders appletinis on a regular basis he’s pleased to note that he only feels a feeble echo of his previous embarrassment.

“Not good at acting? Do you not remember that little melodrama we performed for the benefit of Dean Pelton’s inability to commit to conspiracies? If that wasn’t good acting, what was it?”

Annie huffs and stirs her drink more forcefully. “That’s not the same! I’m talking about real acting, on a stage, with an audience… Acting that _Chang_ can do, apparently.”

“Chang can also navigate the school’s air vents by smell and hear the thoughts of birds – I don’t think he’s the sort of person you want to be emulating.”

“I don’t want to be _like_ him, Jeff,” she says. “I want… I want to feel like I’m _doing_ something with my life. When I thought I was good at acting, I thought I was… making the universe happy, or whatever. I felt like I was finding what I was _supposed_ to be doing in the grand scheme of things, and it turns out that feeling was fake. The universe doesn’t want me acting…”

Annie sighs and seems to wilt, her perfect posture bowing inwards as she rests against the bar top. Her fingers make arbitrary shapes in the condensation on her glass, which is still about a third full, and she’s got a lost look in her eyes that makes Jeff’s heart hurt. He turns so that he’s fully parallel to her, looking straight ahead, and they’re both quiet for several seconds while he thinks of what to say and she thinks about... about the universe, perhaps, and about finding a way to make it happy.

“Annie…”

He doesn’t know why he starts speaking, because he has nothing to say. She’s turning to look at him with expectant eyes, though, so he has to say something, anything. He’s good at talking – he should be able to do this. Just say some words she wants to hear, make her smile again and move the conversation on to something safer, friendlier. But...

“Annie, I don’t know what the universe wants you to be doing," he says instead. "I don’t know if it wants you to be doing anything… I thought it wanted me to be a lawyer, and look how that turned out.” Jeff gives a laugh that’s half humor, half bitterness. He can see Annie’s hand in his peripheral vision, moving away from her glass and toward his arm. She stops about halfway, fingers curling against the surface of the bar instead, and he thinks it’s strange because she’s never been shy about touching him before, about comforting him. Maybe she thinks the universe doesn't want her to do that anymore, in which case Jeff would need to have a _serious_ talk with the universe for putting stupid ideas in her head.

He turns to her so that he's not giving this whole ad-libbed speech to the back wall of the bar.

“But look… that feeling, that pleasing-the-universe feeling? You make that. You felt it because you were doing something you thought you were good at and it was fun. The truth is, the only universe that matters is the one inside your head and sometimes that universe lasts forever and sometimes it lasts a month, or a year, or as long as it takes for the Colorado Bar Association to figure out your Bachelor’s degree is a fake.”

There is a brief moment when Jeff entertains the idea of reaching his hand out to meet hers, still halfway across the distance between them. He doesn't, though. He's not sure why, except that he thinks if he does – now, when Annie is vulnerable and they're both a little tipsy - it might turn into something more than a comforting touch. And he knows they aren't - _he_ isn't - ready for that.

It all goes unnoticed by Annie, who asks, “So how do we know when we’re doing something that’s _actually_ right?”

She sounds very lost and Jeff remembers that she’s a young woman who once had her whole life planned out for herself. She’d taken all the right classes all through high school, had narrowed down her perfect university and her perfect graduate school and her perfect major – probably her extracurricular activities, too, in order to round out her transcript. She’d thought she'd known her place in the universe, once upon a time, and Jeff can see that she desperately wants to find it again. Or, at least, she wants to find that feeling of _knowing_ again.

“We don’t know,” he tells her. It’s as close to the truth as he can give her, because the _real_ truth is that maybe there is a way, but Jeff hasn’t found it. He never even got as close to it as Annie had, before everything started falling apart for her. "We just keep trying until we think we've got it, and when it doesn't work out we try again."

She glances down at her drink, picks it up, and downs the final third. “The universe sucks.”

The sourness of the words shock Jeff more than Annie finishing off her drink without so much as a grimace. After all, he worries about this sort of thing: Annie turning as bitter and jaded as he's always been.

(But... maybe not _always_. There was once a time when Jeff was fourteen and gangly and awkward and asked a girl out on a date to the fair, probably.)

“Hey – this is a bar for people who don’t hate themselves, remember?”

“I don’t hate myself,” she tells him. “I hate the universe. Can this be a bar for people who hate the universe?” Casting a weary look at him, she finishes with, “Just for tonight?”

There’s a brief pause before Jeff gives in to that look, to _this_ Annie – unhappy, and confused, and perfectly within her rights to be unhappy and confused – and clinks his glass against her empty one. He finishes off his own drink – which thankfully wasn’t that full, since it’d be a shame to gulp down such fine scotch – and smiles at her. He flags down the bartender so her can order another round.

“Just for tonight, let’s hate the universe,” he says.

“It made me jealous of _Chang_.”

“The universe sucks.”

 


	5. Fundamentals of Progress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeff gets Annie's help planning his classes. Takes place after 6x05.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whaaat? Two updates in the same week? Must be vacation time in the land of wordybee.

Making the call to Annie was a split-second decision for Jeff. He was fine all through the dialing, setting up a time to meet, and the idea of revamping the syllabi for his classes to be actual syllabi and not just the lyrics to The Clash’s “I Fought the Law” typed up in Times New Roman. It’s just now, when Annie’s standing in his office holding a binder full of well organized notes on law classes and talking to him about lesson plans and “optimal education-to-coolness ratios” that he’s regretting his sudden determination to be less like the teacher he’d been all semester and more like a teacher who actually earns the (miniscule) paycheck he cashes every week.

Basically, Annie makes things more complicated for him. It’s a disconcerting emotional mix of being exhilarated by her enthusiasm and intimidated by the amount of effort she expects from the people who ask for her help. There’s nothing more exhausting than being wrapped up in the whirling tornado of Annie On A Mission.

“Okay,” she’s saying as she sets her binder down on his desk, “I know you’re teaching Fundamentals of Law and… Examination of Law and Ethics? What’s the difference between those?”

“An extra eleven hundred bucks a semester.”

“ _Regardless_ ,” she growls, “you should really build the second level course off of what you taught in Fundamentals of Law.”

She looks at him expectantly, and Jeff is reminded of all the teachers who had ever asked him for the homework he’d failed to do the night before. " _So_ , what are you teaching in Examination of Law and Ethics?”

“Uh… _Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom_?”

“Jeff! Seriously?” The perfect blend of surprise and disappointment makes Jeff slouch down in his chair and he longs for the bottle of scotch in his desk drawer. “You could at least bore your students with videos related to law. For god’s sake, put on _12 Angry Men_!”

Jeff huffs and shrugs. “Greendale’s library has a really limited selection of movies, so sue me.”

“I can’t sue you, I don’t know how – the law professor’s busy teaching everyone about zebras and the wonders of the arctic instead of actually teaching law.”

That’s it. Jeff opens his drawer and thunks the bottle of scotch on his desk. Before he can get his glass out and ready for pouring, however, Annie picks up the bottle and sets it on the empty desk on the opposite side of the room. Jeff lets his head roll back against his chair, knowing full well that there’s no competing with Annie like this: all determined, expectant, and energized with the idea of doing good and helping people, regardless of whether or not they're willing to cooperate. Not for the first time, Jeff wonders what the hell she would’ve been like on Adderall, if this is Annie _sober_.

“I made you that Fundamentals of Law syllabus last year,” she says when she returns, rolling the other office chair up to his desk so that she can sit down. “Why didn’t you just re-use it and change the dates on everything, like all the other professors do?”

“Ah, but that would mean teaching and grading all the assignments on the syllabus.” He gives her a pointed look, as if explaining something to someone very simple-minded, rather than a woman who could quite possibly be the smartest person he’s ever met. His tone and the look make Annie’s glare so much more potent, and – okay, he knows he’s got it bad when she’s sexy even when she’s ten kinds of disappointed and pissed off at him.

She flips through her binder until she finds a blank sheet of notebook paper and clicks her pen furiously. Jeff’s not sure how someone can click a pen furiously, but she manages to do it. She writes FUNDAMENTALS OF LAW at the top of the page in precise, neat handwriting and underlines it.

“You do realize that you’re a teacher, right?” she asks, voice dripping with the same condescension he’d just used on her.

“Well I didn’t want to be!” Jeff rolls his empty scotch glass back and forth across his desk and avoids looking at her. “But apparently I angered a vengeful god or ran afoul a fickle genie’s curse, because here I am.”

She waits several beats before saying, in a softer voice, “You did really well last year, though, didn’t you? You told me you were actually having fun teaching.”

“I was having fun talking, Annie. The rest of it gave me hand cramps and made me realize no one in this school knows the difference between _loose_ and _lose_ or how to use the correct form of ‘there.’” She lifts her eyebrows. “Present company excluded, of course.”

Annie colors in a little bullet point on her paper and then writes the word _lecture_ next to it. “Well, your Fundamentals class has a minimum writing requirement of six thousand words if I remember correctly.” She writes _6,000 words_ on the line under _lecture_ , next to its own bullet point. “So if you don’t want to make that one big paper at the end of the semester like I'd planned last year, I suggest breaking it up into smaller papers… Maybe make them online discussions or blog entries, to save your poor hands from cramping? Then, at the end of the semester the big paper can be a thousand-word IRAC on a case you choose. They’re a good way to get your students to think critically about legal situations.”

Jeff is watching as she talks and writes, mesmerized by the way she breaks down her plan into neat lines of neat writing, differently styled bullet points (and, when she’s done, a star added next to _lecture_ ) and… she might have even managed to italicize her own handwriting. He’s more than a little impressed by this, and he thought he had already learned all the different ways Annie Edison could be impressive. He’s known her for six years, after all – she really shouldn’t _still_ surprise him.

Then again, maybe he should’ve realized after six years that she would always find more ways to surprise him.

“Wow.” He gives her an imploring look. “Is there any way I could convince you to just teach the class _for_ me?”

She rolls her eyes but smiles back at him, her earlier anger soothed by the calming task of making lists and talking about plans. She’s still writing notes on the FUNDAMENTALS OF LAW page, even though she’s stopped saying things out loud.

“You know,” she says with an airy tone, “you’re going to start getting a reputation as an inconsistent professor and no one’s going to sign up for your classes.” She turns to the next blank page in her notebook and writes LAW AND ETHICS at the top. “One year you’re the cool, smart professor who writes sarcastic comments on research papers, the next you’re the _Planet Earth_ guy who gives an easy A but wastes everybody’s time.”

Smiling, Jeff sits up a little straighter in his chair. “Oh, have you been checking up on me with the other students, Miss Edison?”

“I’ve heard some rumors in the past.”

“Mhm.” Jeff folds his hands in front of him and leans toward Annie, who is still making precise notes – though now she’s flipping back and forth in her binder, since she’s less familiar with Jeff’s Law and Ethics class than she’d been with his Fundamentals one – and trying her hardest to ignore him. “So tell me – if you not only know the buzz, but also what’s a-happenin’, how come this little meeting didn’t occur sooner?”

It had taken no time at all for Annie to latch on to Jeff’s slacker teaching methods his first year, but here they are, halfway through the semester and _he_ had to call _her_ for help. Outwardly, Jeff is playfully curious – inwardly, Jeff is stupidly kind of jealous and put out. Apparently he hasn’t been on Annie’s radar all semester, and he wants to know _why_.

“I don’t know…” If she hadn’t been writing carefully, there would probably be a shrug attached to that. “I haven’t exactly been hanging out with the ‘sit around and discuss the good and bad professors’ crowd a lot this semester.”

The playfulness from before leaves Jeff, but Annie is still concentrating on her bullet points and the information she’d pulled from Google on other Law and Ethics classes, so she doesn’t see when his gaze goes distant and concerned. Annie Edison not worried about the quality and standards of the professors at Greendale is a downright frightening development, and Jeff remembers back to that day not too long ago, when she’d almost transferred to City College. Maybe that had been a turning point for her. Maybe that had been Annie Edison, giving up. Regardless of whether or not she’d changed her mind, there’s a chance that something changed in the way she approached education and learning and doing things correctly, and that meant something changed in _her_.

“Huh.” Jeff clears his throat, and then hides it with a laugh. “So... you’re not gossiping with the other cool nerds about classes this time around?”

She pauses in her writing to glare at him, but it’s more amiable than before. “Nerds?”

“I said _cool_ nerds.”

“Whatever.” She clicks her pen closed and sets it down, giving her cramped hand a little shake and exhaling, evidently content with the progress of her work. Jeff realizes that he’s been sitting here, watching her write out thorough notes for _his_ class for nearly half an hour and feels like an ass. He suddenly wishes he had more refreshments in his office than scotch, because then at least he could offer her something.

Annie sits back in her chair, ready for a break, and tells him, “I took a ballroom dancing class the first half of this semester. I just figured… why not?”

“Why not?”

“Yeah.” She closes her eyes and stretches, reaching her arms outward and rotating her head to loosen up her neck and shoulders and Jeff hopes his gulp wasn’t as cartoonishly loud as it felt just now. He also hopes she doesn’t look in his direction for at least five seconds, while he re-applies his cool façade and pretends he wasn’t just totally checking out the way her cleavage went on even more prominent display with that stretching routine.

He can’t really be blamed for it. She’s dressed for comfort this afternoon, not professionalism. It feels like ages since he’s seen her in a bright cardigan and floral dress, and when she’d walked into his office wearing teal and covered in little daisies he’d been struck with a mixture of nostalgia and not a small amount of lust. It was only a matter of time before the whirl of the Annie On A Mission tornado settled down enough that he’d be feeling such feelings again.

Jeff forces himself away from those thoughts, because daydreaming about Annie when she’s two feet away from him probably isn’t the best thing in the world for him to do. “So… you figured, why not?”

When she looks back at him, prompted by his attempt to return to the conversation, there’s a wistful smile on her face and he’s more composed. His fingers are twirling his scotch glass around in little circles on his desk, but his gaze is fixed on her.

“It’s Greendale, Jeff,” she says. “I mean, last year I approached Dean Pelton about the complaints of poor vegetarian choices in the cafeteria and he gave me an extra point on my GPA for ‘staying vigilant.’” The last words were accompanied by air-quotes and a wry grimace. “We’re pretty far from Ivy League, here, so… why not have a little fun with it?”

Even though he still finds the idea of Annie taking education less seriously very unsettling, Jeff points at her victoriously. “Yes! See! That’s what I’ve been saying for six years! What's the use in me making syllabi and putting in effort here?”

“No!” She points right back at him, voice stern. “No, Jeff – there’s a difference between me taking a lighter semester to have some fun and you throwing away the education of _other people_ because you’re too lazy to grade some papers!” The sternness transitions cleanly to some patented Annie Disney Eyes and she says, “None of this is an excuse for you to stop trying.”

“I never started trying!”

“Yes you did! And over the summer you forgot how rewarding it could be to genuinely try at something, but I’m going to remind you.” She picks up her pen and flips to another blank sheet of notebook paper. “Now, pretend I’m your student and tell me everything you want me to know about law and ethics.”

He looks at her and she's regarding him seriously, back ramrod straight as if good posture allows for better learning. Jeff can feel a fond smile break out on his face and can see when she notices it, too: her expression softens with uncertainty and curiosity. She doesn’t understand why he’s smiling, but she can see something other than amusement in him. He can tell. She’s noticing something, something honest – something he hasn’t been ready to show her for months, and he feels a brush of panic at the thought of her finding out (too soon) what’s been going on inside his head.

He hides it well, he thinks, by saying, “We’ll ignore the irony of me teaching ethics for now. But first – I don’t think the IRAC should be a thousand words.”

“Oh.” Annie blinks, frowns like she’d been expecting him to say something else. She recovers and flips back to her FUNDAMENTALS OF LAW notes, crossing out the line that says _1,000-word IRAC final_. “What were you thinking?”

“We could do two. One for the midterm, one for the final. Five hundred words each. It’s a more manageable size for the IRAC style, and we can judge their progress between the first one and the second.”

She smirks. “We?”

Jeff breathes in deeply. “Fine," he says, his tone tired and accepting of his fate - his inevitable, dismal fate of grading papers alone in this office, without Annie here to brighten the whole room and push him to be better.  " _I_. I’m the teacher. You’re relaxing this semester. I promise not to bother you with all this education stuff again once we’re through with tonight.”

Annie writes down the amended _two 500-word IRACs_ , and shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it, Jeff,” she says with a small, pleased laugh. “You’re my friend, and I’ll always be willing to help you. All you have to do is ask.”

 


	6. Curiosity Killed the Cat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeff invades the privacy of his friends and it bites him in the ass. Takes place during 6x06.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been written for a long time but I never posted it because I'm terrible.
> 
> Also, I mention dates in here that aren't confirmed in the show but are my best guesses based off various things like Jeff's birthday being in November and the dates that college semesters end.

From the number of _Re:_ tags in front of the title, the email has an incredibly long-running chain of replies, but Jeff doesn’t recognize the address and probably wouldn’t have clicked on it if the title didn’t look so strange amongst the _Re: Question About Homework_ and _When do you want to have lunch?_ subject lines. He’d been seeking out emails specific to the group (or, even more specifically, himself) and he’d found a bunch before and after getting to Annie’s inbox so he should've been done with this invasion of privacy a long time ago. But then he sees this one that says, _The Ongoing Adventures of Fancy Cheese and Lightbulb._

He clicks it. Of course he clicks it. With a name like that, he really has no choice.

After a cursory scan for context, Jeff surmises that Annie is corresponding with a French pen pal named Marie – who is, he assumes, the titular _Fancy Cheese_ , which makes Annie _Lightbulb_. It takes Jeff longer than it should for him to get that the whole _Lightbulb_ thing probably derives from Annie’s surname – Edison, Thomas Edison, etc. – but the real mental wall rises up when Jeff imagines Annie _making_ that joke. For some reason, he can’t quite get his idea of her to mesh with something so silly, or the playful way she talks to her pen pal, or the inscrutable inside jokes they obviously have together. Yes, he’d seen Annie get all childish and loosey-goosey with Abed on a number of occasions, but they’ve been rare moments that only recently became more common because, as Annie had explained to him, she’s been trying to _relax_ this semester.

The persona Annie has adopted in order to correspond with Marie “Fancy Cheese” Blanc is one that’s been consistent for at least a year, judging by the date of the first email saved on the server from Marie’s address. For a year or longer, Annie has presented herself as more relaxed, more humorous, more playful…

But she hasn’t been a completely different person. _Lightbulb_ has had the life of Annie Edison, the friends, the experiences, and she’s shared them with this pen pal more consistently than she’s shared them with her friends at Greendale. It isn’t right, that Annie trusts a total stranger from another country with this side of her – but, then again, Jeff is currently reading Annie’s personal emails after promising not to do this very thing, so maybe she’s got the right idea. Maybe you shouldn’t trust the people closest to you with your secrets.

During Jeff’s scan of the emails – a scan because reading all of the words written between Annie and Marie would take long than Jeff has patience for, sitting in his darkened living room at half past one in the morning – he notices that Annie doesn’t ever mention the group members by name, but they do come up in vague terms.

_From: Marie_  
 _Date: February 23, 2014_  
  
_Annie, I’m sorry to hear about the loss of your friend. It sounds like he was a complicated person but you liked him anyway. I hope things look up for you soon._

It becomes a game for him to pinpoint exactly who Annie is talking about in her emails to Marie. The one about Pierce’s death is simple deductive reasoning – Annie hasn’t “lost” many friends, and Troy hadn’t left for his trip so it wasn't a non-death loss (and anyway, Troy could be described as a lot of things but "complicated" wasn't one of them) – even though the date is delayed from the date Pierce died. Sometimes figuring out the subjects of Annie’s emails is just that easy ( _"One of my friends is really into movies, so I thought I’d get him this poster for his birthday but I keep getting outbid."_ ) but other times she’s describing events in their lives so broadly that it’s impossible to pinpoint. He kind of wishes she’d given them weird codenames to make things easier, but then Jeff remembers that it’s not _supposed_ to be easy for him to figure out who Annie is talking about in her _personal emails_.

The clock up in the corner of his computer tells him that he’s been reading _The Adventures of Fancy Cheese and Lightbulb_ for half an hour. It’s well past time for him to stop – hell, he should never have even started – and he’s about to, he is, until his eyes catch another section of email from Annie.

This one’s dated _December 17, 2014_ and it’s just as vague as the rest of the exchanges but Jeff knows that date, or close enough to it. Mid-December of 2014 was around the time of Borchert’s lab. The time down in the lab had been significant for him – but what had Annie thought of it? How exactly does someone explain saving a community college via a secret underground laboratory to someone who wasn’t there?

_Big things have been happening at my school this semester. Only some of them relate to my grades and my degree, even though that’s been a big deal, too. (By the way: I took your advice and applied to the internship in D.C. Even if I don’t get in next semester, I think it was good for me to try.) A lot of stuff was personal, though, and a lot of it was strange… The gist is that my friends and I saved my school from getting shut down and I finally think I’m over someone I never thought I’d be over._

Jeff doesn’t get it at first. He reads sentences like _I’ve had feelings for him for years_ and _he’s been such a good friend even if nothing actually happened_ and he thinks first of Troy, that maybe the remnants of Annie’s old crush had finally faded away after Troy left for his voyage around the world.

He doesn’t know if it’s stupidity or ego that keeps him from realizing that the feelings Annie was talking about in her letter were for _him_. It’s a bit of both, probably. Ego because there’s a part of Jeff that thinks everyone loves him, just a little, and everyone always will. Stupidity because it takes him too long to remember Annie’s words when she gave a Winger Speech of her own down in Borchert’s lab about letting go.

_So that’s that_ , he thinks with numb finality. He’d been wondering if Annie still had feelings for him, if she’d even accept a date with him if he asked her out, and here is the answer. He’d been agonizing over those thoughts for months, and now he realizes that it was all for nothing. How ironic that Annie had apparently gotten over Jeff the same day he’d truly realized his feelings for her.

It fits that Jeff finally comprehends that he’s not the center of Annie’s world through this email chain sent back and forth across the Atlantic and half the continent of North America. There is a world outside for Annie. Outside of this school, this city, this state, there is a world waiting for Annie Edison with open arms and she is well within her rights to run toward it, and away from him. There are people – French people with nicknames like Fancy Cheese, future bosses, future underlings, future husbands and best friends and enemies – who are waiting for Annie on the outside.

He has no claim on her, and he never did. He is not the most important person in her life and he probably never was. Jeff Winger is no longer her crush, her true love, or the name she doodles in the margins of notebooks and daydreams wedded bliss about. It’s his own fault, he knows – because he should have accepted his feelings for her a long time ago, just owned up to what he’s really known, deep down, to be true for years. He didn’t; she moved on.

The end.

Jeff clicks his way out of Annie’s emails and glances at the time again. He shuts his laptop and sets it on the couch beside him, then gets up.

He needs a drink.

 


	7. The Needs of the One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During 6x07. Jeff has two conversations and neither one makes him feel good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woooops, more angst. Sorry, folks.

The band calls a ten-minute break and Jeff figures they aren’t as bad as he had thought they would be, even though they’re Britta’s favorite. He says so to Elroy as they both move away from the center of a crowd that’s dispersing from the main floor – and then immediately cringes when he remembers that Elroy likes them too. The other man gives him a look, but seems to take the insult to his favorite band in stride and Jeff doesn’t think anything else will come of it.

Some music filters through the sound system beneath the clunks and hums of the band shutting off their instruments and leaving the stage. The music is significantly more mainstream than the band and the lower volume makes it easier for the people around them to mingle and chat. The cafeteria is quickly filled with the low, indistinct murmur of a lot of people carrying on a lot of conversations at once.

“Jeff, you know why I didn’t care to be your friend?” Elroy says casually, just as Jeff is about to go hunt down… well, just about anyone other than Elroy, really. Now that he thinks they’re on more secure footing, Jeff gets the feeling that the best way to stay friends with Elroy is to talk to him as little as possible.

“Uh…” He can see Annie walking to the opposite side of the room and he really, really wishes he could come up with a reason to follow after her. There’s an awkward conversation coming up with Elroy and even though Jeff feels a little ill and self-pitying now when he talks to Annie, it’s rarely ever awkward. He hasn’t quite made his peace with the knowledge that she’s over him, but he likes her more than he likes the idea of her loving him so he’s going to get through it regardless.

“It’s because I know your type,” Elroy continues, unheedful of Jeff’s discomfort. “I was very familiar with someone like you a long time ago, and it wasn’t a good thing. But I just realized that there’s nothing I can do about other people.”

Jeff is pretty sure there’s an insult in that sentence somewhere. Something about Jeff being a lost-cause jerk, blah blah blah. It’s really nothing he’s never heard before, but still…

“What’s my _type_?” he asks, because that sounds like the area of the conversation that’s the insult.

“You’re a collector.” Elroy says it like he was just waiting for Jeff to ask. It’s a sure, final tone that dares Jeff to argue with him even though Jeff has no clue what that _means_. The confusion is apparently clear to Elroy, though, because he clarifies by saying, “You collect people. The same way little old ladies collect ugly porcelain cat figurines and Abed collects references I don't understand.”

Yeah, that’s definitely an insult. “You make me sound like a serial killer.”

Elroy waves dismissively and shakes his head. “It’s not a terrible thing. It’s just who you are. You surround yourself with people who can do stuff for you, or make you feel better about yourself. Everyone has their own way to survive, Jeff. I get that now.”

Jeff wants to argue but he thinks about all the people he’s manipulated before, right down to the ones he considers his closest friends. He started out in the study group as a lazy, charming puppet master whose only goal in life was to figure out how to get everyone around him to do the things he didn’t feel like doing. Annie was good for homework. Abed was good for just about any menial chore, in the beginning, although he’d caught on faster than everybody else. He used Shirley to guilt people into doing what he wanted and he used Britta to fight battles he didn’t care enough to fight and he used Troy because he was the easiest way to get to everyone else.

And those are the people Jeff cares about.

“Oh,” is all Jeff can say in response, which earns him another odd look from Elroy. As if Jeff’s calm acceptance of Elroy’s assessment of Jeff’s character was unexpected. With it laid out in front of him like that, though, how could Jeff do anything _but_ simply accept it?

Jeff knows that accepting Elroy's unflattering opinion is just fueling the internal pity-party that comes to him at random times during the days after the email fiasco, but he thinks he's still within the timeframe for that to be okay. He'll give himself another couple days, tops, and then it'll be done. No matter what, though, if Elroy had wanted a fight he isn't getting one from Jeff _now_.

“My way of surviving was to keep people like you away, but I think it’s time for me to try something different,” says Elroy. It feels apropos of absolutely nothing, so Jeff suspects that Elroy's earlier disappointment might have been because he'd had a segue planned out and Jeff had deviated from the script.

Jeff can see Annie across the room, mingling with someone he doesn’t know: a young woman, thin and tall with strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a bun. Jeff thinks _dancer_ immediately, and remembers that Annie had taken a dance class this semester, so maybe the woman is one of Annie’s classmates. It’s always remarkable how Annie can be friends with almost anyone: dancers, French people, selfish ex-lawyers…

“Uh… Good talk, Elroy, but I think I need to be… Somewhere else.”

“Sure.” He pats Jeff on the shoulder. “I think we’re all meeting at The Vatican after this is done. First round’s on me.”

Without waiting for a reply, Elroy weaves through the mingling crowd and back to the audience area in preparation for the band’s next set. Jeff stays away, hovering near the doors because he’s not quite ready to leave but he doesn’t want to go back to the group, either. He can still see Annie chatting with her dancer friend but it looks like the conversation is winding down and Jeff resolves himself to standing at the back of the room, alone and awkward.

Jesus, it's middle school all over again.

* * *

   
“Hey, where were you all night?”

Annie is slightly out of breath from dancing and there’s a glistening of sweat on her face and neck that’s really, really distracting. Her eyes are bright and happy, though, which is always nice to see. Behind her, the crowd of people attending the Greendale Alumni Dance is breaking off into smaller cliques and groups and couples. The band is breaking down their instruments and chatting with each other, each member still looking as sour-faced and unhappily hipster as they had when they'd arrived. Frankie's steel drums are still on the stage, but their player is nowhere to be found. Jeff only spares a quick glance at all of this, though, as his eyes are almost magnetically drawn back to Annie's happy, flushed face and the way she tugs on the collar of her blouse to cool off her neck and chest.

“Oh, you know me," he says to her, tone flat. "I’m a wallflower.”

This gets him a laugh and an eyeroll, which was what he’d been going for.

“Jeff. Don’t you ever get tired of being too cool for school?”

“Uh, being too cool for _this_ school comes as easily to me as breathing,” he says. “Getting tired of it would actually take _more_ effort.”

She goes to the table set up nearby and pours herself a little cup of punch that – surprisingly – is not spiked with anything. He knows because he’s had about six cups himself, since a person looks less weird standing in the back of a cafeteria during a party if he’s holding a paper cup in one hand and is staring at a smartphone in the other. The non-alcoholic beverage at a school event just proves that Greendale is a truly bizarre world that is only getting more bizarre as time moves forward.

Sidling up next to him against the wall, Annie goes, “Soooo,” and Jeff knows he’s in for another draining conversation tonight. “Did you and Elroy really patch things up?”

“I might have accidentally had a moment or two of human vulnerability that fixed things.”

“Accidentally?”

He does his best to keep the bitterness out of his voice and he thinks he succeeds. It comes out sounding more like his usual sarcasm when he says, “Yeah – they’re not really in my wheelhouse, remember?”

“Oh, come on.” She smacks him lightly on the arm. “Abed and I weren’t being totally serious about that. We were just making fun of you because you were mocking us for worrying about Elroy.”

“Were you?”

She looks up at him, then does a little double-take when she sees that he’s not just being glib about it. Annie’s expression softens and her arm wraps around Jeff’s elbow, a comforting gesture that probably would’ve been targeted at Jeff’s shoulder instead – if she were taller or he were shorter – or his hand – if they were a couple and allowed to hold hands. They are none of those things, though, so she wraps her arm around his, the same way she always did when he would offer his arm to her and say, _Milady?_

“You’ve done _so_ many things that prove that you’re a good person, Jeff, and that you care about us. I think you get lost a little sometimes, but you always find your way back to doing the right thing.”

 _Because of you_ , he doesn’t say. Of course he doesn’t say it. But the truth of it has been with him from the start: Annie’s potential disappointment in him has been a powerful motivator for as long as he’s known her, because nothing makes Jeff want to do the right thing more than the knowledge that doing the wrong thing would disappoint Annie.

“Elroy thinks I collect people,” he blurts, because he can’t think of anything else to say that isn’t something stupid and sappy and possibly destructive of the outward peace he's made with Annie not having romantic feelings for him anymore.

The words surprise Annie enough for her soft expression to morph into something suspicious and bewildered. “What, like a serial killer?”

“No, like… I just keep you guys around because all of you make me feel better about myself and you do things for me.”

“Hm.” She finishes her punch and throws the empty paper cup into the trashcan by the door without removing her arm from its place around his. It's a pretty remarkable shot. “Well, Elroy hasn’t known you as long as I have. There’s something to what he says, but not when it comes to us. You’ve done too many things you never wanted to do and didn't really gain anything from. There are much easier ways to boost your ego than being friends with us, as I'm sure you know.” She shoves him playfully.

Annie tells him that she’ll see him at the bar after she helps clean up the cafeteria a bit and Jeff vaguely agrees to whatever she’s saying. When she glances over her shoulder to give him an encouraging smile as she's walking away, he knows he doesn’t look at dazed as he feels or else she would’ve turned back and asked him about it.

He feels dazed because he feels better after talking to her, and the fact that he feels better makes him realize that he needs her. It's worse than collecting people, he thinks. He needs Annie and Abed and Britta and, to a lesser degree, everyone else that’s ever flowed through his strange, familial circle at Greendale. He needs Troy and Shirley or, at the very least, the knowledge that they’re out there in the world, waiting to be needed. They all do make Jeff feel better about himself, but he’s not a leech, he’s not using them and disposing of them like he’d done with people in the past. They’re necessary parts of his life because they fill it with something other than himself.

Jeff is no longer the center of his own universe. He hasn’t been for a while, but he’s suddenly feeling it all at once. Jeff has always had lackeys to influence and bosses to suck up to, always had the will and power and skill to manipulate the human beings around him into doing whatever was best for _him_ – but he’s never needed people.

The knowledge is terrifying and lonely, because he knows – as surely as he knows that he needs his friends – that they are all going to leave, each and every one of them. And he will be left behind, still needing them.


	8. Self-Sabotage and the Art of Denial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post 6x08. This has gotten entirely out of hand.

In the movies, time would have slowed down for him. Would've made him capable of taking in every breath and movement, every thought and sensation. That would be the cliché, the cinematic device overused by screenwriters the world over, but that’s not what happened – in reality, it all went by quickly. He heard her words and answered them and there was the almost-embrace that had been interrupted by Britta, and he’d had a split second of panic and regret for what had been (and might have been) before he moved on. Being surrounded by aluminum foil and cardboard sets, wearing those itchy eyebrows and the ridiculous sash – it had all acted as a buffer between his feelings and his actions, for the most part. But then the sets came down, the costume came off, and Jeff realizes now that, while time hadn’t slowed down in that moment, his brain’s “record” function had apparently gone into overdrive.

Even now, hours and hours later, he can still remember every detail with absolute precision. He can remember the way his heart had sped up after she stumbled through the words “I love you,” and how instinctive it had been for him to say them back to her. He remembers the look on her face as she moved towards him, the cheap polyester feeling of her costume, the warmth of her hands through his shirt and the smell of apple shampoo as he leaned closer to her. He remembers wanting to kiss her right there, in front of his friends and strangers and even the cameras, and he remembers how frustrating it was that he hadn’t been able to do so. The frustration still lingers.

He also remembers the flash of realization he’d felt later when he viewed the footage with everyone else: that he’d said the words “I love you” to women before, many times, like they were nothing (and they were nothing, then; just words that worked). He’s said them to get women into his bed, and to push them away. He’s said it to trick them or annoy them – and, well, most of _that_ was just Britta, but the point is that he’s said the words before. Jeff’s never _meant_ them before, though, and he figures it’s fair that the first time he says them and means them, the person he’s talking to just thinks it’s a great ad-lib for a shitty science fiction movie. It’s karmic retribution, a fitting conclusion to Jeff’s spiral of womanizing habits, and he’s fine with it. Mostly.

No matter what, he’s not going to admit to heartbreak over it, that’s for sure. Jeff Winger doesn’t do heartbreak and he doesn’t do unrequited love. He’s told himself before that he can accept that Annie doesn’t love him back, and it’s true – he can accept it. The movie thing just irritated the wound, so to speak. In a few more days, Jeff will be back to his general state of acceptance and he’ll be able to look at Annie without thinking about kissing her, about warm hands on his arms, and the smell of apples, and her lips forming the words “I love you” – except with more confidence, with more truth behind them than there had been during the actual moment.

* * *

 

Days later, when it still hasn’t stopped and Jeff’s starting to believe he’s really going crazy, he thinks to himself, _I have to get away from here_.

All he needs is space and time. All he needs is a handful of miles and hours away from the world of Annie Edison and the memories of that godforsaken movie scene. All he needs is to be able to get his feelings back to before, when he thought he was fine with it – fine with the awareness of that _love_ , well-labeled in his mind and undeniably true. He wants to go back to when he thought he was fine with the idea that it might not happen, but he can’t go back to that, not really, because that was when he still believed he had a chance. It was just a waiting game, a poorly-planned plan of showing Annie how much he cared about her before allowing himself to approach her for real. Now he's touched the truth of it and it won't leave him, no matter how hard he wishes it all away.

Now he knows and he _feels_ that knowledge. And yes, there’s a bitter, self-loathing part of him that thinks his crash-and-burn failure makes a perfect kind of sense. The entire time, he’d read her wrong – she wasn’t his guaranteed happy ending, wasn’t just a girl with a crush who was primed to love him for real if he could just show her how much he’d grown over the years. He’d made mistake after mistake every step of the way, and finally – _finally –_ when he’s ready to own up to all of them, to make it right and grow up and just be in love for the first time in his life…

Well. Perhaps there is a higher power out there, making sure Jeff Winger gets what he deserves. He still refuses the heartbreak, though.

_I have to get away from here_ , he thinks again. He’s sitting in his living room, in front of his computer, and there's an maddening, desperate urgency tucked inside of him that he can't dispel. He’s got Google open, cursor blinking in the search bar, but his hands just hover over the keyboard, still and ineffectual. His mind is blank. There’s nowhere for him to go, nowhere he can think of that’s a suitable place to run and reassemble the bits and pieces of his mind that he can feel falling apart, dragged away by a constant cycle of _kiss, warmth, apples, I love you_.

His world consists of Greendale, Colorado and dead ends.

Once upon a time, a young Jeff Winger had thought he’d grow up to drive fast, expensive convertible cars down desert highways going nowhere and everywhere. When he was in fourth grade he’d written an essay about it: _When I grow up…_ was the prompt and _I will see the world_ was his answer. He’d expanded on the idea in the essay itself, of course. Little Jeff Winger had told his teacher – with all the wordiness and hubris of a future professional liar – that he would grow up and he would drive to all the places he could, and fly to the places he couldn’t drive to. He would learn all the languages and meet all the interesting people and nothing would ever hold him back from achieving his goals and living his life to its fullest potential. There would be a new city for him to live in every year, and he would check off all the famous tourist attractions around the world before he turned twenty-five. _When I grow up…_

Kids dream big. Jeff thinks he probably dreamed even bigger months ago, when he still thought he had a chance of kissing Annie Edison until they both were breathless, until she made him forget all the places he’d never been and all the people he’d never met and all the languages he’d never learned.

_I’m never getting away from here_ , he knows. Not permanently - not even for a handful of hours. His computer fades to black from his inaction and Jeff sighs at his blurry, dark reflection in the shiny surface of the screen.

There’s acceptance. A numbness slinks through his veins, leaving nothing but resignation in its wake. It doesn’t matter if he’s never leaving, never moving past all this. It doesn’t matter that he’s trapped, not really. After all, who needs to see the Grand Canyon at forty?

Wanderlust is made for twenty-somethings. So are happy endings and breathless kisses and heartbreak.

He shuts off his computer and goes to bed.

* * *

 

Jeff dreams he’s driving down an empty desert road in a fast, expensive convertible. The world is in a permanent, beautiful period of twilight – just dark enough to see the stars but not so dark that he can’t see the world around him. Annie is in the passenger seat and she asks, _How long until we get there?_ He glances over and sees that she’s wearing her Scorpio 9 costume from Abed's movie, but it’s not weird to him because dreams have different standards for weirdness. The dim light of the fading blue sky reflects off the folds of aluminum foil that frame her shoulders and it glitters in her eyes.

_Not too long,_ he tells her, and ignores the fact that his dashboard has no gauges and there aren’t any signs on the road. She asks him again and again and again, and each time his answer is the same. When he can no longer hear her asking the question he looks over, and he’s unsurprised to see that she is gone.


	9. A Reflection on Scale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post 6x09. Jeff's a coward with dumb priorities, alert the presses.

The idea of, _Annie is right_ , isn’t exactly a foreign one to Jeff. He must have thought it ten thousand times over the six years he’s known her – or maybe some other ludicrous, massive number. For a while, it became a constant state of _knowing_ only interrupted by those rare, once-in-a-blue-moon situations where Annie was actually wrong: potentially cheating the study group out of their Spanish Language credit that first year, some of her manipulative behavior regarding their study habits, her opinion on Zac Efron… But still, Annie is usually right about things, and especially right about things regarding Jeff’s state of mind and why he does the things he does.

He gets jealous of stupid things. He does, on occasion, get wrapped up in winning something unbelievably inconsequential, something so dumb and pointless that the actual battle for the victory is more exhausting than the victory is thrilling.

Jeff realizes that there’s something weird about his devotion to minimum effort always being ousted by the most worthless things. He refuses to spend longer than an hour a day grading papers, but one smarmy English guy shows up and insults his history of scamming the Colorado Bar Association and suddenly he’s thrown into an all-out obsession with grifting. He watched _The Sting_ for god’s sake. He helped the rest of the group corral dozens of Greendale Community College students into a Briefcase Parade and spent several (unpaid) hours on campus just so he could do it. Even Jeff doesn’t really know why some ridiculous things warrant his time and energy while he ignores far more important matters or passes the trouble on to others instead of dealing with it himself.

He thinks, _Maybe I don’t have as much of my shit together as I thought_. That makes him laugh out loud in his blessedly empty office, because _duh-doy_.

Him saying that he _needed_ a win hadn’t been for the benefit of the grift. It hadn’t been something scripted as part of the inconceivably complex plan, although Jeff had tried his best to make it seem like it had been. The truth was that, with everything that had happened over the past year – couple years, actually, since he could probably pinpoint his downward spiral as starting the moment he’d graduated from Greendale – he needed a few of those stupid, pointless wins. He needed a win that was marked with a group hug and a trip out for hot dogs, rather than a triumphant victory.

Triumphant victories are a thing of the past. Jeff understands that with a bitter certainty that he chases with another sip of scotch, his eyes not quite focusing on the papers he’s trying to grade. There used to be a lot of those triumphant victories for him: cheating the Bar Exam, actually getting a job as a lawyer, winning case after case after case based off his own charm and intelligence… He used to be pretty impressive, he thinks – a lying, deceiving cheat, but an _impressive_ lying, deceiving cheat. Now he’s fighting for pointless wins against pointless people, and that’s what’s keeping him sane.

Mostly sane. 

There’s a knock on his door – or, rather, the doorjamb – and Jeff looks up to see Annie standing there, still wearing the same blouse and trousers she’d been wearing all day. 

“Hey,” she says, and Jeff blinks at her in a brief moment of obvious surprise. “I saw the light on when I was going through the hall…”

“Hey.” He sets his pen down on top of his stack of papers and leans back in his chair, motioning for Annie to take the chair in front of his desk. “Why are you on campus so late?”

Annie sits down with a grateful sigh. Jeff wonders, briefly, if her new ‘professional’ wardrobe is worth the obvious discomfort it causes her, but brushes the thought away as none of his business.

“In the chaos of the briefcase parade,” she explains, “a few stacks of the money got misplaced—“ 

“Why am I not surprised?”

“No, they really got misplaced. Apparently Garrett dropped the real briefcase during one of the transfers and a couple thousand dollars got lost underneath some lockers. The dean asked me to help figure out what happened.” 

She takes in the sight of his desk, his papers, his glass of scotch, and the fact that he does actually have a stack of pages marked with the telltale red ink of grading. “Jeff, are you staying after hours to do _professor_ things?”

“The shock at me doing my job is appreciated, Annie.”

“Well, not too long ago your lesson plan was a pop-punk song from the 70s and your lecture was narrated by David Attenborough, so you can’t really blame me for being surprised that you’re actually grading things at ten o’clock at night.”

He sighs. “No, I guess I can’t.” Jeff gives her a mock-glare and gestures to the paper covering his desk. “I hope you’re proud of yourself for this, by the way.”

As he imagined she would, Annie just preens at that faux-anger. “I am,” she says, “and I’m proud of you, too.”

“Why? Some dumb jealousy distracted me again… If I hadn’t let DeSalvo get to me, I would’ve finished grading these by lunchtime and could be drinking in the comfort of my own home by now.” 

Of course, the comfort of Jeff’s home guarantees zero Annie interaction so, really, he’s rather happy with his luck – even if it means spending money on a cab to avoid Annie’s _Jeff I know you think you have the alcohol tolerance of an elephant but you’ve had two glasses of scotch and driving home is not a good idea_ look.

“We all got a little distracted,” she says with a shrug. “I think our group is kind of known for our weird preoccupations… Do you need help with grading?”

There really aren’t that many papers left for him to grade, but Jeff recognizes that eager glint in Annie’s eyes as her own brand of obsessive preoccupation: red pens and using her knowledge of a vast array of topics to mold and educate others. He slides half of the remaining stack over to her and reaches into his desk to give her a pen – a green one, which she frowns at. Jeff rolls his eyes and hands her his red pen, and her expression immediately brightens. He’s not even sure why he tried with the green pen.

“Don’t grade too harshly,” he warns her. “I have a very fragile balance of cool and educational going on and I don’t want to rock the boat.”

Annie looks at him and nods, accepting. “I will lower my standards accordingly,” she says, with an overtone of playful teasing that glitters in her eyes, rather than her serious tone.

“Is having you help me with grading even allowed?” Jeff hasn’t picked up the green pen and started on his own stack yet. Instead, he’s sipping his scotch and watching that little crease appear between Annie’s eyebrows as she focuses on the papers in her lap. It’s the look she always gets when she concentrates really hard on something, and it’ll probably cause some premature wrinkles for her but Jeff can’t imagine finding it anything other than cute. He takes another swallow of scotch at the thought and pours himself a little bit more, thinking that – for once – Annie might be right about him not driving home.

“Other schools give professors assistants,” she says with a shrug. He watches her carefully draw a circle around a few words, jotting corrections in the margins. He probably should have warned her about sticking to circles and cross-outs, since the students will probably recognize her neat, girlish handwriting as… well, not his.

Finally picking up his own pen, Jeff pulls his gaze away from Annie and begins to read through one of the papers. As he’s marking spelling error after spelling error (seriously, do these guys just not understand how Spell Check works?) he allows a pleasant, comfortable silence to overtake the room. He remembers back to the day Annie helped him revise his lesson plan and realizes that this – sitting in his empty office, lit by the warm glow of his desk lamp and very little else – is kind of what he’d been hoping for when she’d said she would always help him. Not the grading, exactly, but the company… and the grading, which he admits will probably go by a lot faster with Annie helping.

But Jeff had never asked her to stay after hours and help him grade papers, or talk about his lectures, or discuss how to deal with a few problem students. Making that effort – especially since things went seriously downhill after he’d read those emails and decided a relationship with Annie was a lost cause – was one of those _big_ things that Jeff didn’t try to accomplish because he’d been too busy trying to conquer dumb things. If he’d put as much effort into his relationship – friendship, whatever – with Annie as he put into stupid grifting plans, what could happen?

What could change?

A spark of hope alights inside of him, a nascent little thing that could be the alcohol pulling ahead of his good sense, or perhaps his proximity to Annie and her adorably impressive concentration. He doesn’t even know if he is _capable_ of working hard for things that actually matter anymore, or if he might just crash and burn with laziness or self-loathing or cynicism and, like a New Year’s resolution, his promises to try would fade away when morning came.

But does he need to try very hard for this? Here is Annie – here are the two of them, together, in a friendly easiness. It hadn’t been hard for him to hand her a pen and a stack of papers. It hadn’t been hard for him to talk to her, to listen to her talk about her day – about her being proud of his progress in accepting his role as a teacher. He realizes that it’s _never_ been difficult with Annie, and that’s probably what always freaked him out: he’d had a perfectly horrible idea of relationships being difficult, tortuous things – things that required a deep alteration in who he was and how he prioritized his life. That opinion on relationships had successfully kept him out of one ever since his briefly serious romance with Michelle Slater had proven his own point.

Yes, Annie changes him. She encourages him to be a better person and he goes out and does it. He cares about what she thinks of him and wants to make sure she thinks positive things about him, which isn’t so strange for someone – admittedly – quite self-obsessed, but it _is_ strange that he tends to make an effort to legitimately rise to her standards, or feels bad when he doesn’t. Annie affects him, alters him, changes him – but she does it in a way that seems painless. Natural, even. Like she has an ability to not only bring out the good in Jeff, but also make it feel like that good has always been there.

Annie is finished grading before he is, as expected – because she’s probably a lot better than him at grading, plus Jeff found himself lost in thought too often – and she waits patiently for him to mark off the last few papers before handing her stack back over.

“Your students aren’t bad,” she says with a smile. Jeff’s returned smile is more of a grimace.

“Apparently you got the good half of the pile,” he says.

“They’ll improve. I believe in your teaching abilities.” She does a little stretch as Jeff finishes off the scotch in his glass and shoves the bottle back into his desk drawer. “Do you want a lift home?”

“I was just gonna call a cab,” he says, pointedly. If he’d said anything else, she would give him _the look_ and he wants to prove he’s way ahead of her. Some more of that effortless goodness that Annie inspires, rising up in him.

She waves the idea away, though. “Why? I’m here. I have a car.”

“You have a hunk of rust held together with willpower and possibly magic.”

“I guarantee you that my car is perfectly capable of getting you to your apartment, Jeff,” says Annie.

She’s standing in front of him, leaning against the front of his desk as he leans against the other side, and the proximity – it’s definitely the proximity – makes that little hope-spark blaze a touch hotter. Jeff wishes he hadn’t put his scotch away. He doesn’t know why he’s faltering at the idea of Annie driving him home, other than thinking that maybe _this_ is the part of it all that requires real effort. It all seems so easy when they’re quiet, but when Jeff actually has to talk? When he has to follow Annie to her car and, what? Drop hints about being in love with her? Talk from the heart? Carefully monitor every movement, every word, and every look for an indication that his hope isn’t going to die another painful death before it can even really get started? 

There’s the trouble. 

Still, he manages to nod his head and grab his jacket and follow Annie into the hallway. He locks his office door behind them, listening while Annie starts to tell the full story of the Case of the Missing Briefcase Money and making the occasional sardonic comment. Within the context of friendship, it’s not so difficult to walk with Annie to her car and talk with her and laugh with her. It’s just the moments when he becomes aware of that flare of hope that worry cuts through him, and he gets these thoughts of _important_ and _dangerous_ and _triumphant victory_ that make him long for the stupid victories again. Only the stupid victories, forever.

Actually trying for those big, important victories opens up opportunities for big, important losses, Jeff understands. _That’s_ why he never does it; mystery solved. And Annie can't be one of his losses. He _can’t_ lose Annie – he can’t lose this easy friendship, the way she can brighten his day by just walking next to him or sitting in the same room with him – because he doesn't know what will happen to him if she's not in his life anymore. The tiny flicker of hope for something more can’t compete with the absolute terror of losing what he has now, no matter how enticing that hope may be, no matter how potentially wonderful success could be. 

As Jeff crams his too-long legs into Annie’s too-small car, he realizes that living for forty years without knowing you’re a complete coward is a remarkable, remarkable thing.


	10. Nuance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set before 6x10. Jeff enjoys a brief period of time in which agonizing over his feelings for Annie is not on the agenda, but a game of Snap might be.

"It'll be fun!" Annie says. Jeff knows it's a ridiculous lie, because what could be fun about cramming seven people into a rather tiny RV and traveling through the Rocky Mountains with a giant hand statue strapped to the roof? Nothing about that concept seems fun to him – in fact, just thinking about it makes him long for his sofa and whatever programs might be unwatched on his DVR.

But Annie has that _"I'm planning all the snacks and bringing extra phone chargers and stocking up on cards and games!"_ look on her face as she wheedles and smiles and persuades him to say he'll go. He can't exactly say no to that face – and risk making it fall in sadness and disappointment? The very idea is so laughably impossible for Jeff that, before even agreeing out loud, he's trying to figure out how he'll have to shuffle his plans around so that he can still have his Monday lecture ready in time for class. Then he mentally congratulates himself for prioritizing his class over catching up on episodes on trashy television. He wonders if he could find a way to casually slip that information to Annie at some point during the trip, because he does enjoy that proud, impressed look she gives him whenever he does something unselfish and good.

(The fact that doing unselfish and good things is probably canceled out when those “unselfish and good” things are done solely to get on the good side of Annie is ignored by Jeff, of course. Motivation is motivation and good is good.)

* * *

 

It's half past _what the fuck am I doing awake_ in the morning and Jeff's ignoring the commotion coming from a group of men surrounding a hideous hand statue and a crane. Elroy's RV looks even smaller and more unfortunate than Jeff remembers it being. As soon as he steps inside, it hits him that he'll have to stare at the ugly interior of this oversized van for hours and hours and hours, and all the brainless entertainment apps in the world couldn't save him from the inevitable boredom that sits, looming in his near future. He regrets not packing a bottle of scotch, because he's pretty sure that Elroy hasn't got any - laws against alcohol in a functioning motor vehicle being as they are.

Then again, Jeff doesn’t think being drunk would actually make a difference for this trip.

Just as he’s cursing Annie Edison’s pleading Little Mermaid eyes, the woman in question slides through the RV’s doorway. She’s got two tote bags in each hand and a blanket under her right arm, but she doesn’t look like she needs any help as she maneuvers her load of road trip materials over to Elroy’s kitchen table. At least, Jeff supposes one would call that thing the ‘kitchen’ table – and that is Elroy’s ‘kitchen’ chair, and Elroy’s ‘kitchen’ couch… This thing makes the dinky apartment Jeff had lived in during his second year at Greendale look like a mansion.

Jeff sits down on the weird couch/bench combo next to Elroy’s table and Annie sits in the chair opposite him, grinning as she pulls out a series of random crap: unmarked boxes that rattle, two stacks of standard playing cards held together with pink rubber bands, Ziplock bags full of what looks to be homemade trail mix, and a variety pack of chips. She sets all the snacks to the side and neatly lines up the game paraphernalia in front of her, the same way she used to do with her pencils and papers whenever they had exams. She is about a thousand times too chipper for being awake at this hour, practically vibrating with excitement.

Before Jeff can think of a suitably sarcastic remark on Annie’s enthusiasm – which, of course, he actually finds adorable, but no one can know that – Abed steps into the RV and sits on the seat next to her.

“I have a bad feeling about this trip,” he says. “It has all the classic marks of a hijnks-heavy farce, but the atmosphere is all wrong. We’re not in a good enough mental place as a group.”

If Jeff’s honest with himself, he does actually worry about Abed sometimes. Six years of knowing the guy, though, and Jeff’s not quite as affected as he probably should be – over time, weird becomes normal, and it’s only the absence of Troy that makes Jeff think _maybe_ this isn’t just Abed being Abed anymore. Maybe this is a situation that’s going to need to be dealt with, sooner rather than later.

Not that Jeff would be the one dealing with it. He’s hardly within the best frame of mind himself and ‘the emotionally stunted leading the reality-challenged’ doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘the blind leading the blind’ but the meaning still stands.

Instead of attempting anything close to a heart-to-heart, Jeff snarks, “You're never in a good mental place, Abed.” He reaches over and snags a bag of Doritos from Annie’s variety bag, then throws them at Abed, who catches them easily and without losing that weirdly haunted look he always gets when his grip on reality is close to slipping. “Eat some chips and enjoy getting out of Greendale. Meta crap should stay within the city limits.”

“Jeff!” Annie pats Abed on the shoulder, casting a scolding look at Jeff before turning back to her friend. “If he has genuine worries about the trip, you shouldn’t mock him for it. Abed—? Do you want to stay here?”

Abed shakes his head. “I’ll see what I can manage.” No idea what Abed means by that, but Jeff’s pretty much used to being confused by him. Abed opens the chip bag and begins eating, then glances between Jeff and Annie. “You two aren’t holding on to any baggage that could send this trip spiraling into one of our darker episodes, are you?”

“I think the only one with baggage here is you,” Jeff says.

Annie shakes her head, far nicer and more understanding than Jeff can manage these days, and taps the unmarked box full of what Jeff thinks is likely dice. “All I’ve brought with me for this trip are snacks and games. Speaking of which, what do you guys want to play first? I’ve got cards, dice, little disks we could use as pretend currency, and a bunch of fun rules.”

“Only you could say ‘a bunch of fun rules’ without a hint of irony, Annie,” Jeff sighs.

She sticks her tongue out at him. Jeff pretends her playfulness doesn’t make his brain go all fond and fizzy.

“We should probably save the games for a few hours in, when we’re really desperate.”

Annie is flipping one corner of a stack of playing cards, her fingers deftly separating the stack about halfway and then perfectly executing a riffle-and-cascade shuffle like a freaking Las Vegas croupier. Jeff is so entranced by the movement of the cards and Annie’s hands that he barely hears her when she excitedly talks up playing the games again.

“Come on! A game of Snap, maybe? Or Rummy? Go Fish is always a standard, but it might be _too_ standard, I guess.”

Jeff smirks. “I see someone read the Wikipedia article on card games in preparation for this road trip.”

The next session of oddly entrancing shuffles is accompanied by a good-natured glare from Annie. “Please, Jeff. Do I look like a freshman researching her first essay? I get my information from the first-hand experience of volunteering at the Golden Hope Retirement Home on 10th Street.”

“You played Snap with old folks? Weren’t you afraid they’d _snap_ their way into heart palpitations?”

“They were fine,” she says, making a face at him. Then she shrugs and goes, “We didn’t actually play Snap a lot. It was mostly Texas hold ‘em.”

The visual of Annie and a bunch of octogenarians playing poker is such a pleasing one that Jeff genuinely laughs, which makes Annie’s eyes go glittery with her own amusement.

He doesn’t notice the look that Abed is giving them until the other man speaks – to Annie, mostly, but his gaze keeps darting back and forth between her and Jeff. “I can’t play games right now. I have to think about this trip, how I could fix it if things go wrong. I have work to do.”

Then he gets up and moves about four feet, which is as far back in the RV a person can go. Jeff rolls his eyes at him. “Abed, your existential crisis of the moment does not count as work. I have _actual_ work to do, but that’s not the reason why I’m not playing Go Fish.”

A scoffing sound emanates from the doorway as Britta enters, carrying a tote bag that Jeff thinks is probably just full of weed and Cheetos. She throws the bag into a corner of the RV – not exactly out of the way, considering that they’re over half a dozen people crammed into a single vehicle – and flops onto the couch-bench.

“Please, what work do you have to do? You’re a teacher at Greendale.”

Jeff holds up his phone. “Monday’s lecture.”

“You’re writing it on your phone?” Britta lifts her eyebrows at him, then smirks. “Or are you using that as an excuse to look busy while playing a solitaire app?”

“Am I playing solitaire on my phone when there’s a deck of actual cards within reach for maximum irony?”

“Duh-doy.”

Another _fffft_ sound of shuffling cards pulls attention back to Annie. “Britta, I have every bit of faith in Jeff writing his lecture.” She looks at him, all proud and – as she said – faithful. “He’s been making a lot of progress as a professor.”

The fact that she would stick up for him makes him embarrassingly happy, but Jeff hides it with a cocky smile. “Have your cool nerds been spreading rumors about me again?”

“I might have heard a few things,” she says slowly, pretending to be evasive and sly in a way that makes Jeff’s cocky smile veer dangerously close to _lovingly dopey_ territory. “But I have first-hand experience in this, too.”

Jeff doesn’t turn away from Annie’s proud-and-faithful-and-sly face (because he can’t; it’s too early in the morning for Jeff to have complete self-control, after all) but he can hear the confusion in Britta’s voice when she speaks:

“Why do I feel like I’m missing something in this conversation?”

Abed, from his place at the back of the RV, finally chimes in. “They’re like that now. Why do you think I’m all the way over here? I can’t think around them. There’s too much nuance.”

The playfulness that had been buoying Jeff’s mood throughout the back-and-forth with Annie abruptly diminishes. Abed might not exactly  _get_ a lot of things regarding regular, personal relationships, but he's dangerously savvy and Jeff seriously doesn't need him hinting at nuances with Annie. “You’re like, four feet away, Abed. And there’s no nuance.”

“Are you guys having adventures without me?” Britta asks. She's gone from confusion to pouting, apparently, and Jeff doesn't want to look away from Annie – who seems to be taking the accusations of nuance in stride, though even she looks a little deflated by the interjections of their friends – but he can perfectly visualize a tired, put-out Britta slouching in her seat as she grumbles at everyone.

“Adventures? Did we fall into a Nickelodeon sitcom at some point?” Jeff finally moves to deliver that one over his shoulder, but snaps back to Annie when a _bling!_ sound erupts from the pocket of her puffy blue vest. Annie unzips the pocket and looks at her phone.

“Sorry – gotta help Frankie out with the movers," she says, standing. "There’s something about crane charges that weren't in the contract." Annie’s in motion faster than Jeff can comprehend, her phone still clutched in her hand as she fires off a response to Frankie on the go. She’s out the door without so much as a backwards glance at him, which makes Jeff do a little pouting of his own.

 _She’s going outside the RV, not leaving the country_ , Jeff tells himself, feeling ridiculous for feeling like he’s losing something when she’s not there. But that doesn't stop his mood from falling even more, and he looks down at his own phone with the intention of getting his lecture started. A small part of him wants to save it for when Annie’s there, and he can use _‘Annie, I want your advice on this point in the closing bit,’_ as an excuse to talk to her without Abed saying more stuff about _nuance_. Another part of him wants to get some of the work done while she’s not there, so he can show her and get that proud-and-faithful look again.

All of him, it seems, it pretty pathetic. However, he decides to just go with it, if only for today. Just one single day where Jeff doesn't feel bad about how happy being around Annie makes him. This trip is destined to be a miserable one - Jeff is crammed into a vehicle he barely fits, and there's going to be a massive, ugly statue on the roof, and Abed's freaking out - but he's going to get _something_ good out of all of this. Even if that something is just a few hours of him ignoring the bitterness and terror and hopelessness that his feelings for Annie tend to inspire.

Britta breaks the silence that had fallen over the RV upon Annie’s departure by asking, “Do you think it’s safe for us to be in here when they load that thing onto the roof?”

He’s about halfway through the opening section of his lecture – _That should be fine for now_ , he decides – so he turns his phone’s screen off and tosses it on the table next to the pile of chips and Annie’s game supplies. It hits the stack of cards she’d been shuffling earlier and knocks them all askew and Jeff briefly contemplates fixing them, then shakes his head and stands up.

“Let me go check,” he says without looking back at Britta.

He’s across the RV and down the few steps about as quickly as one would expect from a six-foot-four guy exiting motor home that is barely wider than he is tall.

Outside, Annie, Frankie, the dean, and Elroy are all watching a team of movers strap a massive hand statue onto a crane. Dean Pelton is mostly whining about the hand getting damaged, Elroy looks sickly at the thought of the statue sitting atop his _actual home_ , and Annie and Frankie are both all-business, shouting instructions to the movers that they scowl at and mostly ignore.

“Craig, the people inside the RV want to know if your giant, dumb hand is going to crush them.”

Elroy turns toward Jeff, then back to the dean. He's clearly worried, maybe even on the verge of some kind of panic. “You said they’d work out weight distribution – is that _thing_ going to crush my _house_?”

Dean Pelton holds up his hands in a placating gesture, but Jeff was pretty much bored with the conversation before he started it so he ignores the reassuring words directed at Elroy. His attention is pulled toward Annie, who is watching the crane-loading proceedings like a hawk, her arms crossed over her chest and clutching her phone in one hand like she’s two seconds from calling the moving team’s supervisors if they make one mistake. There’s no doubt that that’s exactly what she would do, and probably already has their company’s number loaded in her phone for split-second access.

“Getting some foreman experience to add onto your résumé, Annie?” Jeff asks, and is pleased when this interruption of her clearly important shouting-and-watching is met with a small smile instead of a brush-off.

“It’s always good to be well-rounded, Jeff,” she says, eyes flicking away from the statue/crane business to look at him. It seems that she trusts Frankie perfectly well to handle anything that might go wrong while she's not paying attention, so she actually turns her body to face Jeff properly.

“I don’t think you have any problems in that department. You must have to cull your ‘experience’ section regularly to make sure it all fits on the standard single page.”

Annie relaxes even further and even stuffs her phone back into her vest pocket, the air of intense concentration that had surrounded her while she dealt with the movers melting away before his eyes. “Only once every couple months. I have a system.”

Then something in the vicinity of the stupid hand statue makes a crunching noise and the whole group – except Jeff, who couldn’t give less of a damn about anything regarding that statue that isn’t the charming image of Annie Edison shouting at seasoned blue-collar workers – rushes over to check it out. Jeff watches from a distance, grinning openly when he overhears Annie threatening one of the workers with a stern phone call to his boss should any damage happen to the statue or the RV. After things settle down, though, he decides to go back inside.

It takes about half an hour for them to load the hand statue onto the roof of the vehicle – half an hour of thuds, scrapes, shouts, and creaking suspension that makes Jeff think Britta was right to be worried earlier. Britta, though, had fallen asleep on the couch and is dead to the world through the whole thing and Abed’s staring into space and Jeff’s taking a chance and trusting Annie to warn them, should anything go catastrophically wrong. Besides, he’s busy carefully outlining his lecture so that it has a reasonable ratio of mistakes and particularly good bits. Maximizing the amount of Annie advice and proud smiles he could get on this trip actually feels like a better use of his time than worrying about his impending death by hand statue.

When he's done setting up his lecture adequately, he glances at the still-scattered stack of cards on the table and frowns. The sounds coming from outside tell him that Annie and the rest are still discussing things with the moving crew, and that the hand's placement atop the RV doesn't mean they'll be departing any time soon. He takes the time to Google _card games_ and - unlike Annie's first-hand acquired knowledge - does a quick browse of the Wikipedia articles, especially focusing on the rules of Snap. Because it seems fun, he thinks, and Annie will want to play, and he'll run out of lecture notes to discuss well before this trip is over.


	11. Second Law of Thermodynamics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pre- and post-6x11. Jeff thinks it's too late, in a number of ways.

CH 11

Between the ages of six and eight, Jeff had a series of recurring dreams.

The earliest and most frequent was the one in which he was standing in the driveway of his childhood home and his mother was waving good-bye, but he couldn’t move toward her to give her a hug or follow her to wherever she was going. It had been strange, because his mother looked happy – and confused, about why young Jeff wouldn’t go near her, but still happy. Her wave was cheerful, her smile large, and she was always moving away, away, away while her son stood, still and locked in place on the driveway. He always woke up before she was completely gone. Once awake, Jeff would get out of his bed and walk around his room just to prove to himself that he still could.

More rare, but still repeated, was the one that involved Jeff swimming in a large pool – the neighborhood’s public pool, usually, but sometimes it was a swimming pool from a television show or commercial. It would start with Jeff in the middle of enjoying the rare warmth of a summer in Colorado, swimming and splashing and diving – alone, because in dreams lifeguards were unnecessary and other people were too annoying to include. But then the swimming pool’s water would turn into a thick, viscous syrup that made moving next to impossible. Jeff would usually be near the center of the pool and heading toward the edge when that happened, but he wouldn’t get far after that. The water would thicken even further, going from viscous to solid within moments, and Jeff would be trapped – safe from drowning, but completely trapped.

And the last dream in the series was the simplest of them all: Jeff would be in a small room without doors or windows, but he could hear the sounds of his classmates playing beyond the walls. No amount of shouting for help or attention would get them to respond, no insistence that he was truly having _so_ much fun in his room would make them appear in a fit of jealous curiosity. This dream, like every one of the dreams, eventually ended when Jeff’s frustration with them reached too high. This dream, though, was accompanied by childish and illogical jealousy. Jealousy over a fiction created by his own subconscious, from the knowledge that his false, dreamland play-friends were having fun without him, that they hadn’t even seemed to notice that Jeff wasn’t there.

When Jeff went to his mother about his dreams, she had patted his shoulder and told him not to worry. _“They’re anxiety dreams, dear,”_ she’d said, _“and we all have them. You’ll grow out of those ones eventually. They’re a fear of stagnation, and you’re going plenty of places.”_ She’d said that last bit with a knowing, motherly chuckle.

After that, Jeff had gone to look up the word _stagnation_ in the dictionary because his mother, in an effort to keep him curious, always refused to explain words he didn’t know.

He’s quite familiar with the word now.

* * *

 

The aftermath of the paintball war isn’t as bad as it is most years. Maybe that had something to do with the secret nature of the underground competition, or maybe it’s just because there was a member of the custodial staff on the inside, cleaning things up as they went along. Only the cafeteria really had a lot to deal with, thanks to the battle that had broken out a few hours earlier, and the rest of Greendale was… well, not exactly spotless, but up to Greendale standards for cleanliness.

Jeff knows this because Frankie had decided that Jeff and the others were going to help scrub the school down and they’d gone on a fifteen-minute tour of the grounds in order to find the problem areas. After confirming that, yes, the black mold in the stairwell was a persistent issue that should be dealt with eventually but was unrelated to paintball warfare, everyone had been ordered back to the hard-hit cafeteria. In reparation for their antics (and lies, which probably hurt Frankie more than playing the paintball game), Frankie had told them they weren’t allowed to leave until the cafeteria was in usual operating condition. Jeff wonders if she knows how low she set that bar.

Taking a break from scrubbing pink and green paint off of a weight-bearing pillar, Jeff unfolds a collapsed aluminum chair and sits down with a sigh. Two hours after Frankie’s orders were delivered, and Jeff can still see bright paint splotches dotting the room. He tugs off his rubber gloves and drops his scrub brush on top of them, yawning. Manual labor is terrible and exhausting, he decides, and for once he’s actually thankful that he’s a teacher. A high-paid, totally awesome lawyer would have been better but… Yeah, being a teacher isn’t actually the worst.

The squeak-thunk of another chair being unfolded makes Jeff look to his left, where Annie is sitting down and tugging off her own rubber gloves. Annie’s black dress has a smear of silver on the hip, but she looks okay with it. She actually looks fairly cheerful – tired, of course, but cheerful.

“I’m pretty sure some of these splatters are from a couple years ago,” she muses, tugging her hair loose from its fraying bun in order to re-do it. Little curly-cue strands of hair stick to her temple from sweat and there’s a smear of light pink paint across her chin, but Jeff – ridiculous sap that he’s become in recent months – still finds her remarkable.

“One of the things I thought was a paint splatter was just a sticker,” Jeff says. “Greendale is weird.”

“But it’s our weird,” Annie replies. “And speaking of Greendale – Frankie told me she overheard a real gem of a Winger speech. I’m glad that being a teacher here hasn’t dulled you.”

“No, no,” he sighs. “Bored me. Terrorized me. Pained me… But never dulled me. Not when it comes to talking my way out of problems, anyway. But I might have become a worse lawyer since I started teaching law.”

She laughs. “I doubt that, Jeff.”

He thinks, _Of course you do_ , but just shrugs instead of saying it out loud. There are a few other people milling about, some with scrub brushes and some carrying supplies to the people with scrub brushes, and he watches them work for a little while. Annie seems okay with the silence that’s fallen over them – the silence that still slightly surprises Jeff in how comfortable it is – and when she speaks, it’s in a musing tone.

“Did you really say Greendale is like cigarettes and carrot sticks?”

Jeff purses his lips, wary of the cautiously casual tone Annie is using. “Something like that,” he says.

“And… you think that Frankie could turn Greendale from cigarettes into carrot sticks, huh?”

Jeff isn’t sure if he hears a note of jealousy in her voice or if she is just curious over the metaphor he'd used. Not that Annie would be jealous over anything _romantic_ , of course – but he knows that Annie once prided herself on her ability to make things happen. She’d worked on Greendale for years and succeeded, on some level, but she could never completely remove the cloud of _pathetic_ that perpetually hovered over the school. Why, she must be thinking, would _Frankie_ be the one to turn Greendale around, to change what couldn’t be changed before? And where had Jeff’s sudden faith in the woman come from?

To assuage whatever negative feelings might have been buzzing around in Annie’s mind, Jeff smirked. “I don’t think anything short of alchemy could turn this school into something reasonable or sane. But with people like Frankie – and you – helping… occasionally, I see some positive changes. In the end, though, I said what I said to get what I wanted, which was for a custodial worker to stop being a lunatic for five minutes.”

He can hear Annie chuckling and glances over to find her picking at the stain of silver paint on her dress. “I guess I missed a real winner,” she murmurs.

“There will be others,” Jeff tells her. “There are always more Winger speeches. From now until the end of time. Or, you know, from now until the end of Winger.” That came out more morose than he’d intended it, so in an effort to distract, Jeff settles into a different position on the fold-up chair and turns to Annie more fully. “But enough about me – rumor has it that you had quite the death scene out here.”

Her attention flits away from the paint on her dress as she looks up at Jeff. There’s a slight blush to her cheeks and a glimmer in her eye and she coyly says, “It was okay. I might have gotten a round of applause.”

“Was there universe-pleasing going on, and I missed it?”

Annie laughs. “No, no pleasing the universe. I had fun, though. The applause was nice, but knowing the student productions these people pay to see, I’m not sure I’m going to take it as a sign to move to LA and start working for that Academy Award.”

The weird thing is that Jeff could see Annie living in Los Angeles, wearing fashionable sunglasses and fashionable clothes and becoming a star. Then again, he can also visualize her sitting in the Oval Office, or wearing a white lab coat in a hospital, or holding up a detective’s badge and a warrant for someone’s arrest. Annie, to Jeff, is remarkable in so many more ways than just looking good while covered in the sweat and grunge that comes with hours of scrubbing paint off walls. She’s has a versatility to her remarkableness that makes her fascinating and a little bit dangerous, which is always fun.

“Fun is good,” says Jeff, to Annie and himself. “Pleasing the universe can come later.”

She hums in agreement and silence falls again, only occasionally interrupted by the distant clunking and swishing sounds of the people around them continuing to clean. Again, Annie is the one who breaks through the lull in conversation. Jeff wonders if she’s as comfortable with the quiet between them as he is, or if things are awkward on her side. Or maybe she’s just the one who has things to say.

“Frankie gave me a lecture,” she says with a sigh.

“Let me guess: it was something along the lines of ‘You’re better than Greendale paintball. You’re bright and responsible and shouldn’t stoop to these lows when you could be doing great things instead of silly things.’”

“Almost exactly.” Annie looks at him with something like… fear, he thinks. Like she’s not sure how to deal with the idea of Frankie having such high expectations for her. Because Frankie is normal – more normal than anyone associated with Greendale has any right to be – and Annie doesn’t know how to deal with the idea of real, _normal_ people expecting things from her. Her own self-doubt might the reason why she’s not running a whole Forensics division in Denver right now, or even just ordering around interns at a lab somewhere downtown.

Jeff knows he isn’t exactly helping when he says, “She’s right, you know,” but it’s a necessary truth. Annie’s remarkable, dangerous versatility doesn’t exist just because she’s a decently capable woman set against the backdrop of an incapable Greendale student body. There is no bell curve for Annie’s abilities or talents, and Jeff doesn’t need a Greendale filter for sussing competence in order to see that Annie could do whatever she set her mind to doing. He just knows. And he knows that she’s wasting away at Greendale, her potential woefully unfulfilled.

He tries not to look like he’s taking a deep breath in order to feed her a lie, tries to make sure she can tell he’s just making sure he uses his speechifying skills to the best of his ability, to phrase what he thinks is the truth. _Find a way to word this right, Winger_.

“Annie, you could be doing anything – working in forensics, or running an office, or organizing a whole hospital.” Jeff makes sure to meet her eyes and does his best to imbue his words with well-meaning kindness, in spite of how unkind they might seem. “You could be ruling the world right now, but you’re going to go home and you’re going to spend tonight trying to figure out how to get silver paint out of velvet.”

As expected, she looks less than thrilled by what he has to say. Her cheerfulness has turned to worry, even though it’s not like Jeff’s telling her to go out and _actually_ take over the world or else he’d consider her a failure. Maybe the expectations and standards of other people are more stressful than he’s ever given them credit for being, though, because Annie’s got that expression she used to get before midterms and finals. The one that practically screamed _overthinking it_ to anyone who saw her.

After another idle scratch at the flaking, persistent smear of paint on her hip, Annie turns to Jeff and – eyes reaching full Disney levels of doe-like – asks him, “Couldn’t ruling the world come later? Like pleasing the universe.”

The idea makes Jeff laugh because, “When I was your age, do you know what I would have given to rule the world?”

Jeff’s gone through his qualms and thoughts about their age difference, about how Annie still kept a Tamagotchi in app-form on her phone, about how she’s the kind of woman who would always have a variety of puffy paints for crafts and put too much glitter on the homemade birthday cards she gave to everyone – he’s done _all_ of the thinking. But he’s never thought about this. About how different and the same they are, about how Annie’s drive to _go, go, go_ mirrors his own in the strangest, most interesting ways. That drive has existed in both of them, at some point in their lives. They’ve used it in different ways, abused it in different ways – Jeff let his burn out and dry up like an ancient desert lake, while Annie’s putting hers on pause as she takes dance classes and plays out dramatic death scenes in the middle of the Greendale cafeteria during a paintball war.

The biggest difference between the two of them is that Annie still thinks there’s time. Annie can rule the world and please the universe _later_. All Jeff knows is _now_ and _before_ , and the future is just a wasteland full of dried out lakes and long, empty roads going nowhere.

“You still could,” Annie tells him, breaking through his dismal thoughts. Her upbeat attitude from before is surfacing again, bit by bit – in the way she pushes her shoulders back to assume a more confident posture, and the way she primly flattens the skirt of her dress against her leg instead of picking uneasily at the stain of silver paint. “Rule the world later.”

Annie even believes in a _later_ for him. Jeff smiles a small smile, ducks his head down so that she can’t see that it doesn’t reach his eyes. She’ll probably assume the action to be some classic Jeff Winger aloofness, but he knows that later – _later_ – she might think back, and wonder why he hadn’t said anything cocky and egotistical in response. The remark is just asking for it. If Jeff were in a better mood, if his back didn’t ache from standing for too long and then sitting in this godawful chair, if he could just get the images of deserted roads and ancient lakebeds out of his mind, he would have played along.

 _Of course I will, Annie_ , is what he should say. To keep her from thinking about it. To keep her from asking questions and prodding at why he would be sad, and making it into something it isn’t: something that could be fixed.

You can’t fix time, and with time comes a loss of power – Law of Thermodynamics and all that. There’s no such thing as perpetual motion, because entropy eats and eats and eats away at energy, at hope, at _later_ – until all that’s left is stagnation.

 _I’m already ruling the world,_ he doesn’t joke. _Greendale is my base of operations. This whole teacher thing is a deception to keep the masses the passive sheep that they are._

 _Ruling the world sounds like too much work. I’m more of the 'befriend the world-ruler, get free stuff' type_.

 _We could rule the world together_.

He says nothing. Their break will be over soon, and he can allow scrubbing paint off of walls and lugging around buckets of vinegar and water to distract Annie from his mood, his strangeness, and her own, personal worries. He can let the ache in his lower spine and the raw feeling of his knuckles and the vinegar-caused burning sensation in his nose distract himself from thoughts of empty roads and infinite stillness.

He can go home, and go to bed, and fall asleep wondering about the fear of stagnation. About how unbelievable it is, being afraid of something so inevitable and logical. Jeff wishes he could be afraid of something more reasonable instead, like spiders, because at least spiders could be killed. It’s difficult to swat time with a rolled-up magazine.


	12. let's turn on and be not alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post 6x12. Abed talks to Jeff about Special Episodes, and Jeff thinks his apartment is too empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: this is a chapter about alcohol. There’s a lot of alcohol in it, some of which is consumed illegally and troublingly by fictional characters. Just a word of warning.
> 
> (and special thanks goes to bethanyactually for helping me get this thing done.)

The first time Jeff got drunk, he’d been sixteen and it’d been on a large bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine. It had been pale pink and too sweet, but not sweet enough to cover up the noxious cheap alcohol taste that overwhelmed any other flavoring – strawberry, presumably, but maybe that was just the name of the Hill and had nothing to do with the flavor. It sure as hell hadn’t tasted like _wine_.

He’d swiped the bottle from the house of a classmate, who had probably gotten trouble for it after. Jeff didn’t care. He hadn’t liked the kid anyway, though he couldn’t remember why. Nor could he remember why he’d wanted low-quality “wine” in the first place.

Drinking an entire bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine was both a chore and a mistake, which Jeff had realized almost immediately after doing it. The next day, it had been as pink coming back up again as it had been going down, with only the flavor having changed – sickeningly sweet turned bile-sour, and Jeff vowed not to touch alcohol for a long, long time. He kept the vow, even a while after he was legally able to drink, but it was doomed to be broken eventually.

Eventually, he learned that he had to drink when chatting up pretty women at bars, because that’s just what you did. Eventually, he learned that he had to drink when doing business and socializing as a lawyer, because that was also just something you did. Eventually, he learned that he had to drink to keep from flying off the rails when his hard-earned, well-intentioned job as a defense attorney crashed and burned and he lost himself to the grand and dramatic despair that came with dashed hopes and undeserved punishment from the universe. Everything happens eventually, whether it’s dashed hopes or the realization that drinking cheap alcoholic beverages at sixteen leads to pink vomit and shamefully trying to hide your Sunday morning hangover from your mother.

Jeff doesn’t think he’s an alcoholic. He doesn’t know if he has the self-awareness to determine things for certain (self-awareness, he finds, is mostly troublesome and exhausting – general apathy is far easier to deal with) but even he has to recognize dangerous habits. He has scotch in his classroom. He stores ice in his desk drawer. He has a bottle stashed in his office, too, and in the space under the counter in the cafeteria. When he thinks about it, he tells himself that it’s all part of his image – what says “teacher who doesn’t give a damn” better than a desk drawer full of ice cubes and a bottle of midrange scotch whiskey?

There’s a part of him that sees Annie clinking glasses with him at a bar, or swiftly delivering another drink into his hands at Garrett’s stupid wedding prep party, and thinks, _I can’t be too bad_. He can’t be too far gone if Annie’s still encouraging him, if she hasn’t said a word about being worried or told him to dial back the drinking. A touch of narcissism, perhaps, makes him wonder how she hasn’t noticed that his alcohol consumption has increased considerably since he became a teacher at Greendale, but her silence still allows him to pour another glass. If he were in trouble, she would let him know.

(She has her own life and her own problems to worry about. He knows this. She isn’t his babysitter or his wife or his keeper. He knows this. Still, there is a part of him that _needs_ her to be a safety net of Disney eyes and pointed morality. He knows this, too.)

He doesn’t want to admit that he’s disappointed when it’s Abed who confronts him when everyone meets up at the Former Casa de Trobed to tidy up and unwind after Garrett’s bizarre wedding reception. He also doesn’t want to admit that there’s anything wrong at all, even though he’s noticed the liquor stashes and recognized the problem himself, but that’s really par for the course.

Annie and Britta are in the kitchen and he can hear Britta trying to argue that saving the alcohol from some of the glasses that had been poured and left behind in the mad dash to the wedding isn’t weird. Understandably, Annie is arguing against such unsanitary money-saving measures, and even though a lot of what they’re saying is muffled by the walls and the distance between them, Jeff catches a few horrified questions from Annie about what _else_ Britta has been repackaging since she’d moved in. He’s about to go into the kitchen to hear Britta’s answer – he’s eaten dinner at this place before; he has concerns – when Abed steps into his path.

“We need to talk.”

“You’re not my disgruntled girlfriend getting ready to break up with me, Abed,” Jeff tells him, face automatically morphing into a scowl. He’s not sure when an instantaneous scowl became his reaction to Abed talking to him, but it keeps happening. Something about the other man sets Jeff’s nerves on edge, like he triggers a fight-or-flight response just by existing near him.

“I worry that you’re heading down a dangerous path. One with Special Episodes which, if I’m calculating things correctly, have a sixty-seven percent likelihood of being instigated by your accidental murder of me.”

Oh, right. Jeff scowls when Abed comes near because Abed is freaking weird and there’s only so much a man can take.

“Thanks for that daily dose of what-the-hell. Now, I’m going to go make sure Britta’s casserole dish from last week wasn’t made out of the leftovers of previous casserole dishes. If you’ll excuse me.”

The feint-left, turn-right trick Jeff tries on Abed fails – possibly because he’s turned slow and predictable in his middle-age or possibly because Abed is a psychic shaman from another planet and saw it coming via his multi-dimensional perception. Either way, he’s stopped by the other man’s faster reflexes and unblinking stare. Jeff can only sigh and accept that he won’t be able to escape this conversation for a while, tries to comfort himself in the knowledge that he doesn’t actually have to pay attention to whatever absurdity falls out of Abed’s mouth while he’s trapped. He can still hear Annie and Britta bickering in the kitchen, and the clinking of dishes that he assumes is Annie – predictably – washing them, despite assigning Britta the task.

“You tried strangling me in a pile of Frisbees,” says Abed. He sounds pretty calm about it, though. “And more recently, you slapped me in the face.”

“You were acting like a crazy person.”

“Jeff, we’ve known each other for six years. That’s kind of my shtick.” Abed shakes his head. “If I were directing the show of your life, I would assume that something big was on the horizon. Something to do with the fact that you keep a full bottle of scotch in your desk drawers. And hidden inside a counter in the cafeteria. And behind that loose brick in the library stairwell.”

“I’ve abandoned that bottle. The raccoons that live inside the walls are always angry and I don’t feel like getting a rabies shot.”

“So you admit that there’s a bottle there.”

Jeff rolls his eyes. “Of course there’s a bottle there. Come on, Abed – do you know how many of Greendale’s teachers are drunk most of the time? The answer is, ‘all of them, including the one who runs the weekly AA meeting in the gym.’ When I turned in my W-2 information, the Dean gave me the Greendale Teacher Care Package, which is literally just a dollar store shot glass set and ten of those tiny liquor bottles you get on airplanes.”

Abed looks at Jeff with that blank-but-preying gaze that always precedes something simultaneously cutting and profound. Jeff thinks, as neither of them talks for what feels like forever, that he might be able to make his escape. Brush past Abed and his irritating ability to see what no one else seems to notice (what _one particular person_ seems to have missed) and ask questions that Jeff doesn’t have the answers to. Why does he hoard scotch whiskey around the school like a squirrel preparing for a long winter?

(Why did he steal that bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine when he was sixteen? Why did he drink it? Why did he have no one around, back then, to ask him questions and worry and tell him not to do stupid things?)

He can hear Annie’s voice in the kitchen, asking Britta to put plates _here_ and not _there_ and he wants to go and watch the chaos that is those two women sharing a living space. He doesn’t want to listen as Abed probes for the truth and bothers Jeff with his genre-savvy nonsense and the ability to pinpoint problems.

“Does it have something to do with Annie?” he asks, and Jeff breathes in sharply through his nose, wishes that deep breath wasn’t as telling as it really is.

“Look, Abed,” he snaps, because if he’s ever learned that lashing out isn’t a good way to deal with things that make him uncomfortable, he’s forgotten it. “I know you’ve been bored ever since Troy left, but I’m not going to be your weird meta project.”

Referencing Troy is a low blow. Abed hasn’t so much been _bored_ ever since his best friend left as he’s been _lost_. Usually Jeff is sympathetic to that fact, but he wants out of this conversation more than he wants to be a good friend – if he’s ever been a good friend. He’s not sure about that, these days. Sometimes he thinks that Annie might have been right, months and months ago, when she worried that the group would eventually break apart and no newsletter updates or WhatsApp messages would be able to save them.

Even when Abed flinches at Troy’s name, Jeff can’t stop talking. Can’t stop digging in a little deeper, as he thinks to himself, _at least I didn’t hit him this time_.

“Do you remember when your thing was making movies? Now it’s shitty documentaries built around cousin-incest weddings and examining my personal life? For the last time: I’m fine. I don’t need another breakdown of sitcom formats or _special episodes_ , and I don’t need your help.”

That’s about as good a last word as Jeff is going to get, so he ignores the commotion going on in the kitchen (Britta lecturing Annie on how the modern woman shouldn’t need to know the correct way organize a kitchen) and makes a beeline for the door instead, grabbing his coat and keys from their place on the couch as he moves. Some quick reflexes save the door from slamming shut behind him. He’s not a teenager throwing a tantrum; he’s a grown man making an exit, and slamming doors would not be in his favor.

When he gets to his car and slams _that_ door shut, he takes solace in the fact that no one is around to notice. Starting his car seems like a good idea, but Jeff can’t get his hand to move the keys up to the ignition. Instead, he sits – staring at the grungy yellow light of the streetlamps ahead of him, listening to the occasional whooshing growl of a passing car. The lack of movement is one part exhaustion and two parts preparation. He doesn’t want to go home. He never does, these days. The apartment that waits for him is empty of life (in great contrast to the apartment Jeff just left, which perhaps has too much life, but is still better for it), and thinking about the well-equipped liquor cabinet at home makes his stomach turn.

Waiting, listening to those passing cars and watching as distant bugs flutter through the sickly light of the lamps, not making a decision to either go back upstairs or go home – all of it distracts Jeff from the guilt. Distracts him from the gnawing thought that Abed shouldn’t have been the one to confront him about the alcohol stashed around Greendale.

Not that he’s drinking because he wants Annie’s attention – of fucking _course_ he isn’t – but still. There’s a tradition with these sorts of things. Jeff’s making bad decisions? Annie lets him know about it. Annie stops him after a class and wants to talk to him. Annie looks at him with imploring blue eyes and a concerned frown and asks him if he’s okay, and tiptoes around the idea that maybe he’s _not_ okay, and tells him that she cares for him and wants him to be okay. A break in tradition means something is changing. Like maybe whatever concern Annie used to have for him is fading, like he’s becoming less and less a priority in her life.

A tiny chime sounds from the jacket still resting on his lap, indicating a text message, and Jeff digs his phone out of his pocket while trying not to hope that it’s Annie wondering where he’s gone. Because _Jesus_ , he is not sixteen and drinking bottom-shelf fruit-flavored wine because a girl in his class doesn’t like him and likes the party-throwing rich kid instead.

(Oh, _that_ was why he’d stolen the Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine. Jeff pauses to chastise himself for being such a clichéd loser when he was younger.)

The text message is from Abed, though, not Annie. This night has a theme to it, apparently.

 

FROM ABED 7:48pm

**We were always an ensemble cast.**

 

How is he supposed to reply to that? Jeff rolls his eyes and tosses the phone onto the seat next to him, finally shaking himself out of his slump and starting his car. He’ll go home and listen to some music – which is a hell of a lot better than listening to passing cars – or watch some TV – which is leagues more entertaining than bugs fluttering through jaundiced light. It’ll be fine, he tells himself.

But as he’s merging onto the main street that will lead him away from his friends’ shared apartment, Jeff thinks. And thinks. The whining, droning pseudo-folk music that streams through his car speakers does little to pull him away from his thinking, and he switches the station until he lands on something poppy from the decade before he was born.

 _We were always an ensemble cast_ still cuts through the bubblegum-60s sound no matter how high Jeff turns the volume, and just when he stops at the intersection that will guide him toward home, it hits him:

The safety net exists, whether it’s in the form of Annie’s blue eyes or Abed’s piercing stare or Britta’s scathing mockery. It came in the form of Shirley gently chastising him when he did something stupid, and in Troy’s grinning acceptance of whatever Jeff said, and – in more recent times – the friendly understanding from Frankie and Elroy. The fact that it wasn’t Annie who got to him first means nothing other than Abed noticed a little bit faster out of a group of people who _would_ have noticed. Eventually. And probably would have organized an intervention with banners and streamers and pre-written speeches, rather than Abed’s more careful and understanding confrontation.

So he doesn’t get to have another quiet conversation with Annie about caring and friendship. Does that matter so much, in the end? More than the confirmation that yes, absolutely, there are people in this world right now who are willing to talk to him when he’s doing stupid things? Who are capable of putting aside their own troubles and problems (and Jeff _knows_ that Abed doesn’t deal well when things get down to the bare-bones, emotions-and-nuance part of friendship) to make sure that he’s okay?

Jeff takes a deep breath. He makes a left turn where he would normally make a right, and he’s on the road to the Greendale campus.

He’s not an alcoholic. He knows he isn’t. But he also doesn’t want his friends to worry that he is, and he doesn’t think that waiting around for Annie to finally stop him in the halls is the best way to deal with whatever he needs to deal with. He might not be an alcoholic, but there’s a situation ahead of him that he can avoid by not acting like a self-centered, self-pitying idiot.

\---------

One of the keys on his keyring opens the door to the South Hall and another key opens the door to Jeff’s classroom. He knows that there are night classes going on in other buildings, so it’s not like he’s lurking after hours where he shouldn’t be (and furthermore, he’s a teacher with _papers_ to get and _documents_ to get in order, so he’s pretty much got free reign over Greendale if he ever does need to lurk) but it’s quiet here. His classroom feels strange in the gloom, so he flips on the overhead light and basks in its fluorescent glow instead.

Only a few quick movements and Jeff’s desk is cleared of booze and all booze-related paraphernalia. Both ice bucket and scotch bottle – only a third full and not quality stuff to begin with – are unceremoniously dumped in one of the large dumpsters behind the building after he leaves.

Getting into the cafeteria should be more difficult for Jeff than entering the classroom building, but it isn’t. For some reason, the locks on the cafeteria doors are the same as on the other doors – maybe even the same as all the classrooms and offices, and Jeff should really test that out one of these days. He doesn’t bother to turn the light on inside, since the windows along the walls allow enough illumination through that it’s not necessary. After finding the bottle – actually less full than he’d thought, which is confusing – stashed under the counter, Jeff exits and throws it into yet another dumpster.

He doesn’t bother with the bottle in the stairwell wall. The thing he told Abed about the angry raccoons was not a lie.

There’s also the bottle in his office desk, which he leaves in its place with the halfhearted excuse that it’s almost new and he doesn’t want to throw it away. That idea stacks on top of the thought of unwinding while grading papers, and the memory of scotch on his tongue as Annie sat across from him and wielded a red pen against his students’ sub-par spelling abilities, and he doesn’t even pause on the way back to his car.

Later, when Jeff gets home, he turns on his TV and lets the mindless jabber of a shopping channel fill the apartment. The decision of what to do now that he’s alone is a difficult one, and for lack of any other options he decides to get ready for bed even though it’s only 8:30 and he isn’t a senior citizen yet.

After he's showered and brushed his teeth and in his room, he finds a stack of half-finished lecture notes on the corner of his bed and rummages through his nightstand drawer until he locates a pen that actually writes. He sits on his bed and tries to channel Annie as he wields the pen against fuzzy ideas and a poor academic grasp of the law, but although he struggles with the blank pages and scribbled words for an hour, he doesn’t get very far. Maybe the next class will be another Write ‘Law’ On The Board And Coast day.

Impatient with his inability to make a lecture on the history of torts anywhere close to entertaining, Jeff reaches over to the phone on his nightstand and turns the screen on so that he can check the time. Except, once the device is in his hands he finds himself clicking the icon for text messages instead of the quick glance at the clock he’d intended. Abed’s strange message is still first up, of course, and Jeff selects it.

Types the word ‘ **sorry** ’ into the reply field.

Hits send.

The notification chimes after only a handful of seconds:

 

FROM ABED 9:34pm

**I know**

 

And Jeff can’t do much more than sigh at that. Because of course Abed knows. He probably knew two seconds after Jeff left, probably had that message typed up before Jeff had even thought to send his apology. Or feel sorry.

His thumbs hover over the phone’s keyboard for a little while, feeling like he should send something else not sure what to type. _Thanks for caring_ sounds too unlike him, _Tell Annie and Britta sorry for leaving_ would just telegraph Jeff’s desire to know if anyone else missed him after he’d gone and he’s trying not to be that guy right now. His phone makes the decision for him when the screen goes black, and Jeff sets it back in its place on the nightstand.

As he leans against the headboard, his lecture papers sliding into a forgotten stack next to him, Jeff does feel better. He feels better for apologizing to Abed, and for mostly clearing his scotch bottles from the school, and he feels better about his place within his odd group of friends. Within life, too, no matter how weird and unlike what he wanted for himself his life is now.

But even though he's feeling better, and even with the indistinct chatter of the television flowing in from his living room, Jeff can't help noticing that his apartment is very quiet.

 


	13. Forward Momentum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeff has some illuminating conversations. (revolves around events of 6x13)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> special thanks to bethanyactually for her beta-reading skills.

CHAPTER 13

 

“She didn’t tell me.”

He hates how pitiful he must sound, slouched in his seat and clutching his still-full glass of beer because he’s too distracted to actually drink, but he can’t help it. Beyond losing his friend – _friends_ , he amends, since Abed’s leaving as well – he’s actually hurt, that Annie had never even mentioned the internship. Never told him her plans or asked him for advice on whether or not she should give it a shot. It feels like another case of her not needing him, not thinking of him as a necessary step in the big parts of her life, and it stings.

Jeff tells himself that he would have encouraged her, would have told her to reach for her dreams and get out of this hellhole, but a niggling awareness of his own selfish nature bites back at the thought. The fact that he’d desperately spun Season Sevens in which they could all be happy together, in Greendale (and – in some cases – blissfully wed), despite knowing full well that _leaving_ would be in Annie’s best interests… Well, he’s not so sure he wouldn’t have tried sabotaging her plans somehow.

It’s a miracle he let her go with just a kiss, and it’s probably some form of masochism that he offered to drive her to the airport and send her on her way. He wonders if he’ll try to pull some last-second sabotage: pretending that the car has broken down, perhaps, or acting as if he’s gotten lost. Not trusting himself to let her go is a bizarre feeling, and intensely unpleasant.

_I’m not the best thing for Annie, even though I love her_ , he thinks, and it’s such a disproportionately bleak thing to think while sitting in a festively-decorated Mexican restaurant, surrounded by Greendale faculty and staff celebrating the end of the semester with various stages of drunkenness.

“She probably didn’t want to jinx it,” says Frankie from the other side of the table, voice reasonable – with a hint of pity, too, because that’s Jeff’s life now. Getting pity pep talks from his co-workers while sitting in a restaurant that’s so utterly ridiculous and low-brow it doesn’t even serve scotch.

“Didn’t she tell you, though?”

Frankie shrugs. “Yeah, but I don’t count.”

Apparently recognizing Jeff’s confused look for what it is, she smiles at him. The pity has shifted toward being slightly condescending, like a high-school guidance counselor dealing with a sophomore brat whose biggest worry in the world is whether or not the cute girl in his American History class likes him.

“Jeff, your opinion of the things Annie does carries a lot more weight than my opinion of the things Annie does. You’ve known each other for six years. You’re practically a family – a weird, highly co-dependent, very unhealthy family with a mysterious favorite son who’s sailing around the world with LeVar Burton?” Frankie shakes the meandering thought away, reaches across the table to place her hand on Jeff’s forearm, and sighs. “What I’m trying to say, here, is that… if _you_ had told Annie not to apply to the internship, she really wouldn’t have done it.”

“You told her not to apply?” Jeff is flabbergasted by the very thought of Annie _not trying_ at something. Not working with all she’s worth toward a lofty, seemingly impossible goal. It’s absolutely ludicrous, the idea of telling Annie not to reach for something beyond Greendale. Telling Annie not to strive to achieve better, when she probably has more potential than all of them put together? That’s actually _insulting_.

The insulted feeling he’s getting on Annie’s behalf is comforting in a way.  It tells Jeff that there’s a chance he’s not the selfish hanger-on that his gut tells him he is. That maybe he would be more than an anchor around Annie’s neck, dragging her down to the slummy depths in which he lives.

Frankie’s leaning back and casually sucking her stupid pink drink through a stupid blue bendy straw, ignorant of the weird mixture of hope-and-despair going on inside Jeff. She shrugs, then says, “I was honest. I told her that an internship as prestigious as the one she was applying for would have a lot of competition, and that her application was going to come from a community college in Colorado.”

“So what, ‘don’t bother’?”

Frankie huffs out a laugh. “That’s exactly what she said.”

“You can’t tell Annie not to do something when she wants to do something,” Jeff tells her, voice infused with a wisdom that’s come from six years of experience.

“You’re right.” Frankie gives him a pointed look. “I can’t. But _you_ probably could. Which is why she told me about the internship, asked for my advice, and was able to completely ignore it and do what she wanted to do anyway. And it worked out, right? She got the internship!”

Jeff forces a smile onto his face. “Yeah, she did.”

“I still think it’s weird you didn’t find out before now, though. I mean, you guys treat privacy and personal boundaries within this group like they’re fanciful fairytale concepts.” She leans forward. “I caught Abed trying to smell my hair the other day?”

“He does that,” Jeff says. “It’s a thing he’s going through right now.”

Frankie finishes off her drink and says, “Anyway. You shouldn’t take Annie’s silence as a fault against you, Jeff… And really, the fact that someone manages to keep a secret in this group is a miracle. One I hope is indicative of you all _growing_.”

“Apart?”

“Just growing. Growing up.”

There isn’t much Jeff can say to that. It might be true, or it might be an illusion brought about by everyone in the group moving past _The Group_. Time passes, people change, and some of those changes lead those people in other directions: around the world with a former _Star Trek_ actor; Atlanta, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; or Los Angeles. Jeff had been a staunch believer in the bonds made between his friends when the year had begun, had even comforted Annie when she feared that they were all growing apart, but it all feels unsettled now. It feels like the sturdy foundation beneath them had actually been built over a sinkhole, and the cracks were finally starting to show.

Conversation fades into companionable quiet as Jeff thinks back, retroactively searching for the first appearances of those cracks. Looking for the signs that their little band of weirdos would start branching out.

(All right, in truth he’s looking for signs that _Annie_ would be leaving. Because it still stings, the shock of her inevitable departure – the further proof that she lives a life he can’t be a part of, doesn’t want him to be a part of, doesn’t _need_ him to be a part of.)

* * *

 

_Abed had never been an effervescent projector of joy and happiness, but the way he was sitting at the table, taking sips of his beer with near-perfect regularity (every fifteen seconds, on the mark) was downright depressing. And unnerving. Jeff hoped he was just counting the seconds in his head, because the ability to perfectly time a beer sip every fifteen seconds without counting would definitely be one of Abed’s scarier weird abilities. Jeff tapped Annie on the shoulder and gestured to their blank-faced friend._

_"Did they finally cancel_ Inspector Spacetime _, or did Abed witness a brutal puppy murder?"_

_Annie sighed. "Message from Troy."_

_"Late again?"_

_"Held up somewhere in Africa, I think? Or maybe South America. They hadn't gotten off the boat yet to see."_

_"Man, you'd think someone who helmed a starship for seven years could help get a yacht around the world without running into literally every sailing disaster imaginable. WhatsApp them not to go anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle."_

_Annie reached over to smack Jeff on the arm._

_"Jeff, it's not funny. He really misses Troy." Annie took a sip of her drink, her eyes glued to Abed's slumped, forlorn shape in his dark corner of the bar. She was practically overflowing with an abundance of pity and a touch of something else that Jeff couldn’t quite pinpoint – something like nervousness, maybe, or anxiety. For Troy, Jeff figured. There was no telling what sort of horrors Annie was imagining him encountering before getting home._

_"We all miss Troy." He tried to catch her gaze, finally succeeded when he lightly brushed the sleeve of her blouse. She turned her worried gaze to Jeff, and suddenly Jeff didn’t feel like joking anymore. There was something desperately real in her expression, a shade of thought or emotion that went beyond simply sympathizing with Abed’s sadness or fearing for Troy’s safety. "You know I get that, right? I miss him too."_

_"Not like Abed, though. Those two were inseparable before he left. We don't have what they had."_

_Jeff had mixed feelings at the thought. No, he and Annie weren’t exactly inseparable – and no, they did not have the type of friendship that Abed and Troy had – but he liked to think that they were close enough to be disappointed in the absence of the other. He knew that he missed Annie when she wasn’t around, wanted to talk to her and be near her and tell her all the stupid things he thought about during the day – in the coolest possible way, of course. But maybe that was all one-sided._

_Sometimes he felt like he was balancing a set of scales with Annie, except that Annie’s side of the scales was hidden behind a curtain. Jeff was piling weights on his side, trying to ease everything level, but he had no idea how to tell what was happening behind the curtain. He had no idea what weights Annie was placing on her side, or if she even knew she was supposed to balance the scales at all._

_The thought was more contemplative and abstract than Jeff was comfortable dealing with, and he didn’t particularly like the sensation of uncertainty it brought about in him. So, he switched to the safe strategy of joking again, because trying to make Annie happy could be pleasantly distracting. When she blushed and laughed and her eyes glittered with amusement, he didn’t mind imbalanced metaphorical scales so much anymore._

_"If it makes you feel any better, I would be very sad if you left,” he said._

_The facetious tone managed to convey the truth in Jeff’s statement while also lightening the mood, and Annie’s lips quirked up in a halting, curious smile. "Really? How sad?"_

_"Inconsolable. Extra glass of scotch and a shopping spree at that douchey place in the mall levels of sad."_

_Annie’s fragile smile morphed into a giggle. "Aw, that's very touching, Jeff,” she said. “Would you compose letters every day and spray them with your cologne before mailing them off to me?"_

_"Are you at war in this scenario?"_

_"I've been recalled to my illustrious estate back in Europe,” she told him, adopting a snooty accent and sitting up straight. “There are matters that must be settled, and I await your correspondence."_

_The accent and the pose made him chuckle despite his need to appear sardonic and aloof. "I'm not sure about the letters, but I am one hundred percent certain that I would send you a sad emoji at some point."_

_He felt like he was winning something, watching the way her mood lifted. He knew her worries for Abed – and Troy, lost somewhere around Africa or South America or the Bermuda Triangle or God Knew Where – weren’t gone. They couldn’t be, not with Annie’s bleeding heart and constant need to fix, fix, fix all the problems her friends faced. But just for that moment, he had succeeded in making her smile. Making her laugh. Making her think of things other than how depressed her friend was, and how she had no power to help him._

_"Sad emojis are not romantic,” she said, and the word sent a little jolt of painful joy to his heart._

_He shoved the next words from his mouth automatically, desperate to make sure she didn’t see him lose his cool: “Who said anything about romance?”_

_Maybe he was imagining it, but the amusement in Annie’s eyes appeared to dim – just a little – at his words. She glanced down at the waxy shine of the tabletop, fingertips pressing against her glass of fruity-vodka drink._

_“No,” she said, voice quiet. Then, like the brief reprise of sadness was nothing more than the flickering of lights during a thunderstorm, the shine of friendly banter was back._

_“I deserve more than an emoji, though,” she said. “Facetime me, at least. You have to promise to Facetime me when I’m gone, if you’re not willing to send the written letters I deserve.”_

_The word ‘when’ flew past him; he was too distracted by the talk of romance and that second of… whatever that was that had dimmed her, just then. It was all he could manage just to say, “You know I don’t get Facetime on my phone, right?”_

_Jeff got the distinct feeling that the mystery scales had shifted, and he had no idea how to get things back in order or what had been done to knock everything so out of balance._

* * *

 

Jeff is standing outside Abed, Annie, and Britta’s apartment ( _it'll just_ _be Britta’s soon_ ) with Abed. There’s an awkward silence between them because Jeff doesn’t really know what to say to the man in front of him. Goodbyes would happen at the airport; doing them now would just mean repeating the same thing later, and Abed’s strictly against the rehashing of old lines unless enough time has passed for it to count as a callback.

It would be helpful if Annie were there, Jeff thinks, but she’s triple-checking that she’s packed everything she’ll need and double-checking that she turned off all the appliances. Arguments – like the fact that Annie hadn’t _used_ any of the appliances that day, or that Britta would be back from work in a half an hour – hadn’t done anything to dissuade her from her pre-journey ritual.

“So… L.A. That’s going to be big.”

Jeff’s not sure why he says it, except that he just wants to dispel the awkward a bit and playing a game on his phone during some of his last minutes with Abed seems rude.

“Probably,” Abed says, returning the inane chatter with the single-word response it deserves.

A beat passes. Jeff sighs.

“I worry about you, Abed,” he confesses. He’s decided that twenty minutes before dropping a person off at the airport is the best time to say stuff like this. Hell, it’s better than the soul-baring experience he’d had with Annie in the study room a week ago. At least there’s no time for him to let this simmer and build into an itching realization beneath his skin. He’ll say these things to Abed, like shouting into a void, and Abed will get on that plane anyway and Jeff won’t feel like he expects the guy to change his mind.

(He’s not actually sure he expected Annie to change her mind, though. Annie changing her mind about this would be too unrealistic, but – like imagining marriage and children and a perfect job and a perfect life with her – there’s a certain amount of… hope, borne of too many television shows and too many movies in which relationships were saved by last-second changes of mind.)

"I know,” Abed says. It’s a reply to Jeff’s confession, though it comes a good thirty seconds after Jeff actually spoke. “L.A. is going to be big, and I feel safe in Greendale.”

The still, stilted way Abed talks – not quite meeting Jeff’s eyes, except now, for some unknown and unknowable reason that perfectly emphasizes his next words – is almost mesmerizing. Jeff is thinking back to that first day with the study group, when he’d insincerely called Abed a shaman, and realizing (not for the first time) how right he’d accidentally been.

“But it doesn't matter how safe Greendale makes me feel,” Abed continues, “if that safety is keeping me from doing what I need to do… I might fail in L.A. I think trying and failing is better than not trying and never knowing if I could succeed. At least failure provides data that I can use to get better. Then, maybe next time… I won't fail."

"Aren't you scared?"

"Yes."

If Jeff is waiting for a reasoning, an excuse, something – anything – after that answer, he doesn’t get it. Abed just does a one-shoulder shrug. Jeff understands that there is no additional information to Abed's fear; it just is. Because Abed is Abed, he doesn’t try to talk his way out of terror – he doesn’t attempt to put on a brave face, to trick himself (and those who would worry for him) into thinking that this next chapter in his life isn’t terrifying.

Jeff knows in his heart that Abed won't be okay in Los Angeles. That place is just ruthless business transactions and cutthroat deals disguised as art. He wants to tell Abed to go somewhere else to expand his career instead – New York, or Portland. He wants to tell him to go to a place that isn't ruled by microexpressions and doublespeak, to go to a place that's more direct and more forgiving and less likely to ruin him and send him packing back home.

But he doesn't. He just tells him, “Good luck,” because a dream is a dream is a dream. And when Annie finally, _finally_ appears with her luggage in hand and all her worries locked in the apartment behind her, they pile into the car without another word about Los Angeles or fear.

The car ride to the airport is part tensely quiet and part frustratingly cheerful, with all conversation dancing around the fact that two of the people in the vehicle would be leaving on great, terrifying adventures. Jeff’s commentary is mostly just about the other drivers on the road, because every time he looks at his friends he’s reminded that he _won’t_ be going on a great, terrifying adventure. Once Abed and Annie are safely ensconced in the realm of overpriced food and uncomfortable chairs that is the airport, Jeff will drive back to his quiet apartment and watch television and contemplate signing up to teach classes during the summer semester at Greendale.

When they arrive at the airport, he helps them with their luggage. He tells them goodbye. He hugs Abed twice, and kisses Annie on the cheek, and wishes them luck – both of them, this time.

He wonders if bravery like theirs might be something restricted to the young, but then remembers that he’s never really been brave like they are. Jeff has been clever, conniving, ambitiously lazy – but never brave, and all of a sudden he’s very glad that Annie never told him about her internship. He’s very glad he never expressed his worries to Abed. The last thing he wanted to do was hinder their bravery with his own cowardice.

* * *

 

The next day, he and Britta meet up at what Jeff’s been calling “Britta’s Bar” in his head for ages without consciously realizing it. As the last two original members of the group left in Greendale, there’s an air of celebratory sadness in their companionship – like some sort of strange Irish wake, complete with anecdotes of past Study Group hijinks and contemplation of what everyone else could be doing at that moment. Britta even pours out a splash of beer in memory of Pierce, which makes the man working the bar that evening threaten to dock pay from her next shift.

After the entertainment from the back-and-forth between a tipsy Britta and her manager dies down, Jeff sighs and lifts his glass of scotch up to tiredly examine the way the light hits the amber liquid. Affecting a careless and curious tone, he asks, "So you're not going to fly off to Florida to become one of those costumed characters at Disney World or something, are you?"

Britta gulps down a mouthful of beer and waves away that thought with a, "Pshaw.” She resettles herself in her seat, the movement deliberate and slow in a way that tells Jeff that his friend is pushing that line between ‘tipsy’ and ‘drunk.’

“Colorado has legal weed and my apartment’s cheaper than its actual value on account of Annie and Troy finding out the landlord’s a perv,” Britta says. “Like, _I_ could pay this rent. I mean, Annie’s actually the one paying for it from D.C., but that’s just because I sometimes forget what day it is.”

"Legal weed, you say?”

“Shut up, there’s no correlation.”

“ _High Times_ magazine is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, just so you know.”

“You’re the worst.”

“We’re both the worst, apparently,” Jeff says, setting his glass down and spinning it idly. “…As indicated by the fact that everyone else is doing things with their lives, and we’re both still here.”

"Oh god," Britta groans, making Jeff glance up from the patterns he’d been making on the table with the condensation left by the glass. He’s met with a wary, alcohol-muddled glare. "You aren't going to try to marry me in a last-ditch effort to stay relevant again, are you?"

The thought actually makes Jeff smile, though it’s a sardonic one. "No, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. I've pretty much resigned myself to dying alone at this point."

He tries to sound flippant about it. Even makes the effort of punctuating the statement with a sip of scotch. Something in his voice or on his face gives him away, though, because Britta puts on that suspicious, awkwardly caring expression – the one that means she _actually_ cares, as opposed to all those times when she only cares because it means she can prove a point or gain something from the endeavor. When Britta _actually_ cares, she’s uncomfortable and impatient and frighteningly sharp. She has _that_ look.

"You know you don't have to, right?" Her words are precise, sober despite the beers she’s knocked back. “Die alone. Or whatever.” The wave of her hand – the one not clutched around the neck of the beer bottle – sends out the aura of _uncomfortable_.

"What?"

"Uuugh, grow the fuck up, Jeff!” And there’s the _impatient_. “You're like a teenager sitting in his parents’ basement, complaining about how he doesn't get to go anywhere or do anything! Get a job bagging groceries, buy a Honda Civic, and join your friends at the shitty bar that looks the other way if you slip them a twenty!"

"Your metaphors get really weird four beers in."

"You know what I'm saying."

"The basement is Greendale... Although I don't know what the groceries or the Honda have to do with anything."

"The basement is Greendale. The job is your big boy pants. The Honda is a plane ticket, and the bar is Annie's place in D.C." She points the mouth of her half-empty bottle at him, having moved into _sharp_ mode with all the elegance of a rampaging elephant. “I’m not sitting here while you wallow in self-pity for the next four months or whatever, you get me? I’ve got a cheap apartment, a decent job, and medicinal herb – and _you’re_ a complete buzzkill.”

“Me? I thought killing buzzes was _your_ thing?”

“Maybe before you turned old and fell in love, you great big Buzzkillington. I didn’t sign up to deal with your bullshit, Jeff Winger, so buy. A. Plane ticket.” She finishes her beer in one last long pull and clanks the empty bottle onto the tabletop. “And buy me another beer in payment for dispensing such sage advice.”

Jeff glares at her, but opens his wallet and signals for a waiter to bring them another bottle anyway, even though Britta probably shouldn’t drink another. She’s started making a little fort out of her empties and whatever else she can find on their tables or the tables around them, so he’s definitely resigned himself to paying her cab fare home.

While waiting for someone to deliver another bottle of bad decisions to Britta, he thinks about her ‘sage advice’ and a realization strikes Jeff: maybe it has never been about bravery.

Maybe everything – watching Annie and Abed head off to achieve more with their lives than Jeff ever achieved with his own, seeing Troy take on a truly mind-bogglingly difficult journey with a smile and indefatigable optimism, all the changes in the group over the years – had been about _growing up_ , not bravery.

Jeff has avoided growing up his entire life. He’s avoided it with charming smiles and the ability to fast-talk his way out of his problems. _Growing up_ has always meant _growing old_ to him – growing closer to insignificance, closer to death, closer to being forgotten.

Maybe, he thinks, the reason why he feels like the world is speeding past him isn’t because he’s turned forty, or because he lacks the bravery that he sees in the people surrounding him, but because he’s refused to _move_ with it.

The waiter brings Britta her beer and Jeff waves away the glass of scotch he offers to set next to his half-empty one. There’s a thrumming in his veins, a heat of understanding and an urge to _go, go, go_ that he doesn’t want to smother with more alcohol. When Britta gets up to go to the bathroom, Jeff opens up a travel website on his phone and books himself a one-way ticket to Washington, D.C.

He thinks it might be time to get out of the metaphorical parents’ basement.


	14. The Water's Fine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What good is living a life you've been given, if all you do is stand in one place?"

CHAPTER 14

_Kiss me goodbye…_

The words preceding their kiss had been her words, not his, but he probably felt them more than she did. To her, it was a simply summer in D.C. and a learning experience. To him, it represented the painful truth that’s been haunting him for months finally solidifying: eventually, everyone he loves will leave him behind.

But he has discovered that truth is relative. Or, at the very least, truth can sometimes be changeable.

In this case, all it takes to make a truth into a lie is action, a refusal to continue passively watching the world speed by him. All he needs to do is get up, pack himself a bag, and get to the airport – and then, like an act of alchemical transfiguration, he’s no longer a person left behind. That truth ceases to exist, and Jeff’s on his way to Washington, D.C., in order to turn a few more truths into lies: like the truth that Annie will forever be impossible for him to reach, or the truth that a forty-year-old college teacher full of anxiety and a bit of carefully hidden self-loathing can never get what he wants, or the truth that he’s not brave enough or worthy enough or well-equipped enough to deal with a life beyond the world he’s always known.

One after another, they become lies. His world expands. He _moves_.

It isn’t as if he steps onto the plane heading east and feels the Earth begin to turn, but it does feel different. Mostly it feels frustrating. Jeff spent so many years of his life allowing the world to go on without him and now he wants to rush to catch up with it, but can’t because things can only progress so quickly, planes are still constrained by flight schedules and safety checks, and the TSA doesn’t really care that Jeff had an epiphany in a bar several hours ago.

Watching the cities and greenery of Colorado shrink and fall beneath him from his seat on the plane feels like the best thing he’s ever done and the worst mistake he’s ever made, but god, there’s no escaping the fact that he feels lighter now. Almost blissfully weightless.

He'd once caught a snippet of something on the History Channel, years ago, about a northern expedition in the 1800s led by a guy named Sir John Franklin. Those hundreds of years ago, during that weird time period when everyone seemed to be trying to explore various wildernesses, Sir Franklin had tried to explore the Arctic. Or maybe he’d been looking for a way to travel the globe faster, so that _other_ people could explore wildernesses more easily. Either way, the expedition had failed and was lost, eventually becoming a huge mystery, until decades later when explorers found some of the bodies and remnants of the ships. The biggest intact find was a group of bodies surrounding a sled loaded up with pointless things like curtain rods and button polish and writing desks.

Lead poisoning, the scientists said. A very simple answer to a very old question, and ultimately as pointless as the objects that had been carried on that mission. Because, regardless of any new revelations, all the men of the Franklin expedition are still dead and everyone in the modern age already knows that lead is bad for you.

But Jeff hasn’t been able to get the story of that expedition out of his head these days. He can’t shake away the idea of something – a hidden thing that warps a person into thinking that the absurd is logical – in the minds of those men compelling them to load a sled up with button polish and curtain rods instead of food and water. They thought they had what they needed. They thought that expedition in the Arctic wilderness couldn't be completed without a writing desk or two, and they lugged that useless crap around in the snow until they died.

It’s familiar.

Unlike the Franklin expedition, however, Jeff has come to his senses well enough to trade his metaphorical sled full of useless crap for a very real, much lighter carry-on duffel bag. Not that he thinks he’s packed a whole lot better than Franklin’s mad crewmates, though. In his rush to get to the airport, he’s pretty sure he accidentally packed two shirts and seven pairs of socks and left his expensive face cream behind entirely.

Whatever. He’s headed toward Washington, D.C., not the Arctic. Washington has shopping centers.

And Annie. Washington also has Annie, who is hidden away inside a bland apartment complex on the slightly more affordable outskirts of D.C., since the FBI internship is unpaid and Annie’s technically using her savings to pay for her summer housing as well as sending money back to Greendale to pay for the apartment she’d left in Britta’s care. Jeff makes a mental note to tell Britta to just set a million reminders for herself and pay her own damn rent, because then maybe Annie could move into a building that doesn’t look as if it might suck the soul out of all who lay eyes upon it.

Annie lives in apartment 614, which Jeff knows because she’d texted him her D.C. address along with the message, _“If you can’t use FaceTime, write me letters until I return!”_ and a smiling emoji. Jeff hadn’t understood the reference until he recalled a conversation in a bar months before, when Annie had said the word ‘romantic’ and Jeff’s brain had briefly shorted out.

The apartment building has no elevator, despite looking drably modern, and Jeff has to climb up three levels in order to get to Annie’s door (the fact that room 614 is on the fourth floor strikes Jeff as oddly Greendale-esque, and he wonders at the probability of Annie having found a little slice of Greendale in the real world outside of it). On Annie’s apartment door, between the metal numbers 614 and the peephole, is a little slot and tab of paper on which Annie has doodled the word WELCOME! in glittery pink pen, and Jeff has to smile at that. She’s barely been in this apartment two days and she’s already managed to make it her own.

He spins the old-fashioned rotary doorbell – probably less of an aesthetic decision and more likely the cheapest possible option for the building owners – and is greeted with a satisfying _briiiiiiiing!_ noise from the other side.

Time passes in fast, anxious heartbeats – _thuddum thuddum thuddum_ – and Jeff can feel the enthusiasm that had launched him halfway across the country fade with each one. It seems like it’s been ages since he booked that flight in a bar, a lifetime since he packed his bag full of its seven pairs of socks and two shirts and no face cream, an eternity since his plane reached cruising altitude and he had felt as light as the air around him.

 _Goodbye._ She had used the word before their kiss, not him, but he was the one who had believed her. He keeps telling himself this. Keeps reminding himself that, for her, their goodbye kiss hadn’t been _goodbye forever_. She hadn’t been leaving him behind.

She opens the door carefully, probably because she's only been in the city for a couple days and there's no logical reason for anyone to be visiting her, so opening a door carefully is the safest option. When she sees that it’s really him – he wonders if she’d glanced through the peephole and hadn’t believed what she’d seen – the door just about flies open, the speed of it causing her hair to flutter around her face. Annie stares at him. She frowns and gets that little crease between her eyebrows, and suddenly Jeff has no idea what he's doing.

It’s like he's fourteen again and gangly, wearing an ill-fitting suit while failing to ask a girl out on a date to a fair, because now he's forty and just as stupid, standing in front of a woman he's loved longer than he knows without an ounce of certainty to bolster him. He can’t figure out what to do next. Even separated from his epiphany in Britta’s bar by hours and distance, he still understands that he needs to keep moving, but he’s _here_ – there’s nowhere else to go, right? All that forward momentum has pushed him as far as it could, and it’s all up to him now. It’s unexplored wilderness, from here on out.

Annie says, "Jeff?"

The look on her face is one of pure confusion, like she isn't quite sure she's not hallucinating from jet lag, even though there’s really no reason for her to still be suffering from jet lag when her trip was two days ago. There's still that crease between her eyebrows. Jeff is fourteen and forty and too young and too old; he's terrified beyond belief but as sure as he's ever been about anything.

Something tears through him – a thought: _kiss her_. So he does. It’s not exactly hesitant, but far from forceful, more like he’s moving before he can really think about what he’s doing and why. Then the kiss is done and he’s standing up straight again. The movement of the kiss – him leaning down, her staying still – has made her hair flutter again, just as it had when she’d opened her apartment door. She still has that bewildered look on her face, still has that little crease between her eyebrows, still looks like she might chalk the whole experience up to a flight through two time zones and too much in her life changing too fast.

"Hello," Annie says. Slowly. Hallucinations and jet lag.

This is the moment in the movie where Jeff is meant to give a heartfelt, off-the-cuff speech, but that isn't happening here. Not now. It’s all a part of the moving – the changing, the growing. Jeff’s lived his life by talking his way through it, by forcing his problems aside with well-timed words and a perfect cadence, all meant to mesmerize and compel listeners into doing his bidding, but this can't be one of those times. This can't be more of Jeff wandering through the wilderness, driven by a madness that tells him a sled full of junk is exactly what he needs to survive.

Luckily, mouths don't always have to make words. As it turns out, they can be put to better use.

Annie’s perplexed haze clears just before she kisses him back. She practically launches herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck, and he has to take several half-steps backwards in order to stay upright. He drops his travel bag so that he can place one hand against her ribs as the other moves to the back of her head, lets his fingertips weave through her hair. Jeff is aware of the fact that he can feel her heartbeat with the hand on her side – fast and nervous, _thuddum thuddum thuddum_ , just like his – and he can taste something fruity on her lips. Lip balm, perhaps, or some kind of drink. He’s leaning against the steel railing and support beam of the balcony and that should be terrifying (it doesn’t exactly seem stable) and painful but all he can feel is her heartbeat and her lips and all he cares about is kissing her for as long as he can.

No matter what, the angle is terrible (the height difference is going to give him spinal injuries, but whatever – it’s worth it) but they kiss and kiss and kiss and Jeff feels like he’s weightless again, feels like he’s tens of thousands of feet in the air and headed toward new truths.

He can't believe it has taken him this long to realize that those swaths of desert and empty roads inside of him only exist because he's allowed them to exist. Emptiness and inevitability and complacency are all his to ignore, if he wants. If he allows himself to want. He's missed wanting; he’s missed the flippancy of it, the vibrancy of it. All he has felt for what seems like forever is a sort of resigned yearning, like a man dying of thirst and wishing for a drink of water he already knows will never come.

Deserts again. Jesus, he's lived all his life surrounded by Colorado mountains and green forests – why did he start thinking he was doomed to die in an imaginary desert? The escape was always there, waiting for him to open his eyes and read the signs that lit the way.

 _Deserts?_ He's closer to the ocean than he's ever been. He's more at risk of drowning right now than drying into a lifeless husk, and even drowning feels impossible. He’s too alive. He can feel his heartbeat and Annie’s heartbeat and taste something fruity on her lips and he has found the river winding through the desolation he’d imagined for himself.

He's forty and in love and realizing that it's okay, it's fine. Goodbye isn't always forever. _Goodbye_ can always be interrupted by _hello_. He can make lies out of a thousand old truths; he can throw away established realities and embrace fantastic new ones. All it really takes is a last-minute flight, some initiative, and Annie to be waiting sixteen hundred miles away.

(Perhaps ‘waiting’ is the wrong term. Annie isn’t the sort of person who would put her life on hold in order to wait for someone else to come along and complete it. She might have been at one time, but she’s not any longer, and Jeff loves her more for that. He needs someone who will always remind him to keep moving.)

Jeff is forty. He can't wake up without his joints cracking a bit, and movies aren't made for him anymore, but that doesn’t matter. Annie is kissing him on the balcony in front of her apartment with everything she has and he’s returning the favor, wondering if it’s ironic that he’s spent six years at her side but could only make his move when she was half a country away. Maybe he’d needed that extra distance to draw him out, to make him realize that staying still and aimless wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Maybe this is just how the world works sometimes, like the misaligned, slipping gears of a clock finally slotting into place after a thousand rotations.

They finally break apart, breathless and heavy-lidded and arms still wrapped around each other. They hear a car alarm go off in the parking lot three stories down, the shouts of children playing in the park across the street, the song of birds in the trees surrounding them. As both of them come to their senses, they realize that Annie’s apartment door has been left wide open, Annie is barefoot and wearing clothes that are barely a step up from pajamas, and they’re making out in public like a couple of teenagers fresh from a very successful first date. Except unlike a couple of teenagers on a first date, it’s not even noon and the sun is bright and hot against Jeff’s back. There’s an old lady walking her poodle through the little squares of green in front of the apartment complex, openly staring at the both of them.

Jeff isn’t sure if Annie’s reddened face is from the kiss or the way she has to lean over and awkwardly wave at one of her new neighbors, post-public make-out. To the old woman’s credit, she smiles and waves back. The smile seems slightly conniving, though, and Jeff is pretty sure his and Annie’s enthusiastic reunion will be building-wide gossip before too long.

“I’m giving you a reputation,” he says, and cringes at how hoarse his voice sounds. Lack of sleep, hours of nervous dry mouth, and kissing Annie Edison will do that to a voice, though.

Annie shrugs. “No worse than the one I have back at Greendale.”

Jeff’s eyebrows lift in surprised curiosity. “You have a reputation back at Greendale?”

She smiles wryly, gives a little one-shoulder shrug, and takes a few steps back so she’s within her apartment again. The cool air from inside flows out and makes Jeff shiver, and he feels the new two-and-a-half-foot gap between them like it’s the Grand Canyon – or the distance between Greendale, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. For a second, he thinks she’s going to wave him away, chalk their kiss up as another mistake best to be forgotten, and he’ll have to trudge back to his empty apartment and prepare himself for dying alone.

But then she opens her door wider and gestures for him to come inside.

“Maybe this new reputation will actually be true,” she says, which startles a laugh out of him.

He picks up his poorly-packed travel bag and steps over the threshold of Annie’s Washington apartment. It’s poorly lit, plain, and all the furniture is cheap and clearly came with the place, but Jeff doesn’t think he’s ever been happier to see the inside of an apartment before. Even one as dinky and unwelcoming as this one. The room dims further when she closes her door, but the grin on Annie’s face is bright enough for him.

They both move toward each other but she’s the one who reaches over and grabs the front of his shirt in a way that allows her fingers to slide a little past the buttons and touch bare skin. He shivers again, but certainly not from the chill of the apartment’s air conditioning, and drops the travel bag once more. Jeff touches both hands to her sides this time, but he can’t feel her heartbeat because she’s calmer now, steadier – more certain of her actions, as he is more certain of his own. He leans forward, she rises up, and they kiss again.

 _Hello_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all: I'm sorry it took over a year for me to write this. That's my fault because I'm terrible and I promise that if I write a sequel, things will go more speedily.
> 
> But thank you, everyone, for sticking with me over the course of this year. Thank you for taking the time to send me kudos and comments. Thank you for reading and for being such a lovely audience! I appreciate it more than you will ever know.
> 
> And a special thanks goes out to bethanyactually, who assisted me with her awesome beta-reading skills for the last few chapters of "Testing the Waters" and has helped me pull things together far better than I could have done alone.


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